We are on May 22, 2011, the Cannes Film Festival is coming to an end. Maryna Vroda has just received the Palme d’or for her short film Cross from the hands of director Michel Gondry. The Ukrainian filmmaker, then 29 years old, in heaven, goes behind the scenes of the Palais des Festivals. It’s dancing, it’s toasting, the American actress Uma Thurman is stretching her legs, champagne is offered to the lucky winners. Maryna Vroda takes a haircut and sees Michel Gondry approaching her. “Don’t kill yourself with this Palme. People disappear once they’ve had it. » She laughs without really understanding the warning, then goes back to Ukraine the next day.
Twelve years later, on August 7, 2023, after forty-eight hours of travel from Kiev under the bombs, Maryna Vroda, in a black and white costume, presents in international competition at the Locarno Film Festival, in Switzerland, her first feature film, Stepne. The film is the fruit of eleven years of work. It has not disappeared, as Michel Gondry feared, it just took time. But Maryna Vroda has excuses: she lived through the Maidan revolution, then the war.
THE journey of the 41-year-old filmmaker recounts the upheavals of her country. Born in kyiv in 1982, she was 9 years old when the USSR collapsed. She studies cinema in the Ukrainian capital and quickly understands that the economic crisis has plunged the film industry, already suffocated by the Soviet iron fist, into a state of hibernation. “When shoes are too tight, they break your toes”, notes the filmmaker. Despite everything, she manages to make a few short films, followed by invitations to festivals and her first trips. Already, she shows her attachment to her native land: for her passport, she chooses to use the Ukrainian spelling of “Maryna”, rather than “Marina”, in Russian.
“An act of resistance”
Meanwhile, Ukraine oscillates, over the course of the presidential elections, between Soviet heritage and European aspirations. In 2010, when pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych came to power, Maryna Vroda realized Cross as an act of resistance “. ” Cross heralds the rebirth of Ukrainian cinema, devoid of a previous generation to draw inspiration from. The filmmakers started from scratch and had to invent everything”analyzes the former artistic director of the Odessa festival, Anthelme Vidaud, author of the book Cine-Ukraine. story(s) of independence (which will be released on November 2 by Warm editions). In Cross, teenagers roam the forest in search of something elusive. “I was wondering where we were headed, my country and myself, explains the director.
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