Please join the Ukrainian Film Club at Columbia University for the opening event of its sixteenth season, a screening of the gripping feature narrative The Turtledove’s Nest (2016) directed by Taras Tkachenko. Professor Yuri Shevchuk will introduce the film and mediate the discussion. The film is in Ukrainian with English subtitles.
The Turtledove's Nest is a drama of broken lives, loves, and family ties resulting from the mass work migration from Ukraine to Italy and other affluent Western countries, where cheap foreign labor is both a necessity and a point of contention. The masterfully told story of one particular family is a case study of one of the most important global trends that affect today’s world.
A woman from a Carpathian village wants to earn money badly needed to pay for her daughter’s education, and sets her sights on Western Europe. It turns out that the money that awaits her in the northern Italian city of Genoa is poison both to her and her loved ones, and to the well-to-do Italians who would like to profit off cheap Ukrainian labor and not think much of it. This film grips the viewer’s attention from the get-go and does not relinquish it to the very end.
Director Taras Tkachenko is one of the most promising directors of the post-Soviet filmmakers’ generation in Ukraine. He has been a member and loyal friend of the Ukrainian Film Club of Columbia University since the Club’s foundation in October 2004. The Club screened all of the films he made starting with his MA project, the much beloved feature short The Tragic Love for Unfaithful Niuska (2004) which he presented in person. Mr. Tkachenko’s new historical drama The Black Raven will have its theatrical release on December 5, 2019.
