From Kharkiv where she has taken refuge, the Ukrainian actress and acrobat, discovered in “Olga” by Frenchman Elie Grappe, gives her testimony to “Liberation”.
In Olga, it was blonde hair, a block of muscle and determination, and the crushed look of a teenager who must grow up too quickly. Rediscovered for its resonance with current events, the first film by Frenchman Elie Grappe, presented at Cannes Critics’ Week last summer and released in November, is rescheduled in several theaters in Ile-de-France. Anastasia Budiashkina played a 15-year-old Ukrainian gymnast, forced into exile in Switzerland to prepare for the European championships, when the Euromaidan revolt broke out in Kyiv in 2013. Tuesday, the 20-year-old acrobat and actress writes to us, directly in French thanks to an online translation tool, from the apartment in Kharkiv where she has taken refuge with three artists from her circus troupe. “They are bombing in different ways, near and far, it’s too dangerous to flee the country right now. The roads are broken. I didn’t know what war was until I saw the 2014 Maidan revolution on TV. This is my second war and I don’t want it anymore.” To speak of distraction or escape seems ridiculous. “I can read a book. Communicate with people who write to me on the Internet. Worry. Play on my phone. Watch the news.»
Originally from Luhansk, in the Donbass, his family was moved to Poltava in 2014 when the separatists took power. On February 20, she still presented Olga in Kyiv (Kiev), for the anniversary of the revolution commemorated by the Maidan museum. The cinema has not dethroned his other dreams. “My project is always to work in the circus. I have drawn a future for myself, I will try to move towards it. I want a house of my own, that my children live in abundance and do not complain about anything. I really want to live abroad, it’s been my dream since childhood. I told my grandmother and my mother that I would live in England and have a huge white two-story house. I will take them there.”