Ukrainian documentary about Donbas, Syria wars triumphs at Florence film festival
A still from “This Rain Will Never Stop,” a documentary film by Ukrainian director Alina Gorlova that won the best feature documentary award in the international competition of the Festival dei Popoli in Florence, Italy on
“This Rain Will Never Stop,” a documentary film by Ukrainian director Alina Gorlova, won the main prize at the Festival dei Popoli in Florence, Italy on Nov. 23.
The documentary chronicles the life of a young Kurdish man who flees with his parents to Ukraine from the war in their native Syria. In Ukraine, he chooses to become a Red Cross volunteer in another conflict: Russia’s war against Ukraine. But his father’s death forces him to return to his homeland.
The film won the best feature documentary award in the international competition of the Festival dei Popoli, or the People’s Festival, one of the world’s oldest documentary film festivals focusing on creative approaches. This year, it was held online because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In its announcement, the festival jury remarked on the history of tragedies in Ukraine: the Holodomor, the Holocaust and Chornobyl. It also characterized today’s Ukraine as “a transit territory to the refuge for the migrants, victims of the wars deployed around (the world) from Donbas to Syria.”
“‘The Rain Will Never Stop’ depicts the dark aura of this place tortured by history using strong black-and-white images which remind of the great school of the non-fiction Soviet cinema,” the jury said in a statement.
Gorlova worked on the film for four years. She first planned it as a short film, but later developed it into a full feature after pitching the idea to Ukraine’s Docudays UA International Documentary Human Rights Film Festival.
“This is the first victory for the film,” Gorlova told the Kyiv Post. “It’s great that the film won in the full-length competition because there were strong films.”
Gorlova’s previous movie is “No Obvious Signs,” a documentary about a Ukrainian servicewoman with post-traumatic stress disorder. In 2018, it won the German MDR TV channel’s prize for outstanding Eastern European film at the DOK Leipzig festival. In Ukraine, it took the main prize at Docudays UA that year.
“This Rain Will Never Stop” is a co-production of Ukraine, Latvia, Germany and Qatar. Ukraine’s State Film Agency funded much of the film’s budget – Hr 2.2 million ($79,300) out of some Hr 6.5 million ($231,000).
The film premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, the world’s largest documentary festival, on Nov. 19. The festival is still ongoing and is taking place online, so viewers in the Netherlands can buy a ticket and watch “This Rain Will Never Stop” over the internet until Dec. 6.
“This Rain Will Never Stop” is also competing in the Amsterdam festival’s First Appearance section for emerging filmmakers along with “Everything Will No Be Fine,” another documentary co-produced by Ukraine. The winners will be announced on Nov. 26.
Gorlova hopes that the film’s Ukrainian premiere will be offline in a cinema at Docudays in spring 2021.