Join us for a screening of the film "The Guide" as a commemoration of the start of the third year of the war in Ukraine. We will host a second event on 3/8 at 12pm with Maria Popova and Oxana Shevel to discuss their book Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States.

The story of The Guide takes place in the early 1930s during the Holodomor, or Terror-Famine, when the Soviet regime killed millions of Ukrainians largely by starvation. A number of nations have formally recognized the Hlodomor as a genocide.

The Guide was filmed in 2012 and released in Ukraine in 2014. It was selected as the Ukrainian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 87th Academy Awards in 2014, It has played in festivals and in academic settings but was never released commercially in the U.S. or Western Europe.

The film's director, Oles Sanin, is a prominent figure in Ukrainian film making. He graduated from the National University of Theater, Film and TV in Kyiv and had internships in the Netherlands and the U.S. One of Sanin's earlier films, Mamay (2003), was also selected as Ukraine's submission for an Academy Award.  In addition to directing films, Sanin is a screenwriter, actor and musician. Among other instruments, he plays the bandura, a traditional Ukrainian folk instrument that is central to the story of The Guide.