ALL THINGS ABLAZE

Director's Statement

The recent Ukrainian revolution proved to be unique in many ways: long months of thousands of people standing stubbornly in the snow; long months in which fellow citizens of all social backgrounds supported each other with unprecedented gestures of care such as sharing food, warmth and medical assistance for free; long months of unbelievable patience and dignity.
However, the Ukrainian experience also proved that something at the core of most of revolutions is ultimately the same. From the very beginning, the mainly peaceful protesters tried to prevent any manifestations of violence. The longer this protest lasted, the harder it was to keep this up. On one hand, the surreal carnival atmosphere of the Maidan became more and more lightheaded with every small victory. On the other hand, the immensely cynical and cruel government of gangsters carried on devising even meaner methods to fight against its own people. Step by step, all this led to lots of incidents that looked like a senseless farce. That eventually resulted in total distrust and chaos. Until one day the heady air of what was still a peaceful confrontation exploded into violence – a violence that seemed to have broken free from the darkest depths of human nature. The subsequent events recalled a snowball of fire that unavoidably led to a tragedy, even though nobody expected the scale of it – over a hundred people killed, thousands injured, and many others still listed as missing.
They say that the Ukrainian nation was reborn in this revolution. And so, that the sacrifice of the Heavenly Hundred (as those slaughtered in the clashes are called), and the whole bloody epiphany of the last month of that winter was not in vain. We, the authors of this film, do not know if this is true or not. We are still very close to the moment when we were standing in the middle of that fire, and wondered what those people who were shot or burnt or beaten to death would have replied to this if they could speak. We are still numb ourselves. The only thing we can do now is to show in detail what we have seen with our own eyes at the epicentre of the fight – with all our unspoken questions which have no answers, not cutting out anything strange or inexplicable (as if there had ever been anything different), not turning our cameras away, either from something ridiculously beautiful, equally ugly or deafeningly dreadful that happened in front of them.