East is East - Knowledge Network

Family Portrait in Black and White
Tuesday, October 25 at 9:05pm
Repeats at midnight
Olga Nenya is a foster mother to sixteen black orphans in Ukraine
– where 99.9% of the population is white and where race does
matter. Forced to constantly defend themselves from racist neighbours
and skinheads, the children have to be on guard against the
society that surrounds them. Olga is a loving mother but she is
not Mother Teresa; she bears a closer resemblance to a platoon
leader. While Olga is on a crusade to save her children from an
unjust world, she is also determined to shape their future according
to her own, often limited vision.
Storyville forum comes through for filmmaker
When Vancouver-based filmmaker Julia Ivanova read an article about Olga
Nenya’s family in a Russian newspaper, she knew she wanted to make a
documentary about them. Growing up in the Soviet Union, Julia saw very
few mixed-race black children, and when she did, they were alone – none of
the other children would play with them.
“This always struck me as something really terrible,” she says. It wasn’t
racism, she explains, but rather a sense of unfamiliarity because the mixedrace
children were not often seen – they were in orphanages.
When Julia approached Olga about the film, she readily agreed to participate.
Filming began in 2008.
As with most independent productions, financing was a challenge. Julia
credits the Storyville pitching forum, presented by Knowledge Network at
the Vancouver International Film Festival, with helping them get the film Julia Ivanova and her brother, Boris Ivanov, the film’s producer.
They’ve worked together on numerous film projects.
made by connecting them with international commissioning editors. The film
has been very successful on the festival circuit – it won at Hot Docs and was
the only Canadian documentary screened at Sundance this year (and the only one made by a woman).
Julia is looking forward to the film reaching a wider audience. “I hope viewers will feel for the children and want to help them, either
individually or in general. Also I hope they will see that human beings are very complex, and that it is possible to love someone intensely
and also to cut off the possibilities for them, as Olga does to some of the children.”
Julia is now working on her next project, a documentary commissioned by Knowledge Network called High Five, about a BC couple’s
rollercoaster ride to adopt five Ukranian siblings.
SEPT/OCT 2011 P RO G R A M G U I D E 9