Glasnost and Film

From January 28 to February 1, 1989, York University hosted Glasnost in Soviet Ukraine, the inaugural Proc Memorial Lecture Series at Stong College. Bahry was one of its four organizers and chaired the panel on film. Seven representatives came from the Soviet Union, a number the published proceedings call unprecedented. The proceedings describe the symposium as the first international and interdisciplinary conference on the subject.

Around the panels ran an exhibition of paintings by Feodosii Humeniuk, screenings of Yuri Ilienko’s A Spring for the Thirsty and St. John’s Eve, and a concert by the violinist Oleh Krysa at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts.

In June she organized the International Les Kurbas Theatre Symposium at Stong College. In October she brought the first glasnost documentaries to York in a two-day programme, Glasnost and Ukrainian Documentary Films. That year she also held a Canada–USSR Academic Exchange Grant.

Echoes of Glasnost in Soviet Ukraine appeared in January 1990 and went into a second printing in March. Two-thirds of its essays were first given at the symposium. The rest were added to bring the volume up to the founding congress of the Ukrainian popular movement Rukh in September 1989. Her own chapter, “Soviet Ukrainian Documentary Films and New Directions in Filmmaking,” was later published in Ukrainian in the Kyiv film journal Novyny kinoekrana.

On February 1 she convened the international symposium Ukrainian Glasnost Films 1990 at Stong College, with seven filmmakers and editors from Kyiv. Its roundtable was published in Suchasnist in January 1992.

She then took the films on the road. In 1990 she lectured on glasnost and Ukrainian cinema in Edmonton, Seattle, Waterloo, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Victoria, Vancouver and New Orleans. She spent July to September as Research Associate and Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences in Kyiv, spoke at the First International Congress of Ukrainian Studies there, and returned in November to present York student films at the Molodist youth film festival.

In January and February 1991 she organized the symposium Youth Culture and Perestroika in Ukraine at Stong College, and helped organize Glasnost and the Global Village, which brought the Kyiv rock bands Perron and Broken Barricades to York.

In 1990 and 1991 she advised on glasnost-era film:

• July 1990British Film Institute, London: international conference on Soviet cinema.
• October 1990CBC Current Affairs: programme on Chernobyl.
• October 1990Festival du cinéma international, Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec.
• October 3 to 8, 1990Ottawa 90 International Animation Festival: programme Suppressed Films from Eastern Europe.
• January 10 to 21, 1991Smithsonian Institution and the American Committee on U.S.–Soviet Relations, Washington: symposium and film series Soviet Society in the Glasnost Era.
• February 1991National Film Board of Canada: documentary filmmakers from Kyiv and Toronto.
• February 21, 1991The Globe and Mail: consulting and translation for Kate Taylor’s article on Kyiv rock musicians at York.
• March 1991CBC Television, The Journal: Latvia, Ukraine.
• March 23, 1991University of Alberta and the Alberta Council for the Ukrainian Arts.
• August 1991Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute: Contemporary Ukrainian Film Festival.

From July 22 to September 2, 1991, she carried out research in Kyiv and Moscow for a project on perestroika and cinema, and presented a programme of National Film Board films in Kyiv.

Through Kiev Glasnost Films she produced and edited eighteen educational videos: Ukraine in the 1990s (ten documentaries), Artists and Writers (five) and Satire: Legends: Stories (three). She arranged the donation of 35 mm documentary films from Kyiv studios to York University’s Scott Library. Through the 1990s she advised the Library of Congress, Harvard, Yale, Columbia and other institutions on Ukrainian educational and documentary film.

• “Soviet Ukrainian Documentary Films and New Directions in Filmmaking,” in Echoes of Glasnost in Soviet Ukraine (1990)
• “New Directions and Old Problems in Ukrainian Cinema,” Suchasnist (1990)
• “Rock and Roll Always Lives: The Rise of Rock Culture in Soviet Ukraine,” Compass (1991)
• “The Satirical Current in Popular Youth Culture, Rock Music and Film in Ukraine in the 1990s,” in Ukraine in the 1990s (1992)
• “Rock Culture and Rock Music in Ukraine,” in Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia (1994)
• “Subversions in Dovzhenko’s Earth,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 32–33 (2011–2014)

Full references: Publications.