The film is currently being screened at the international experimental film festival Seek the sun in the "DIARIES, NOTES AND SKETCHES" section.
It is available in its entirety until June 30, 2020 on Open Windows and the Festival platform
Macha Ovtchinnikova
Film maker
The scar of the earth
THE SCAR OF THE EARTH
"Since my childhood, I’ve been hearing about a horrible story. In Ukraine, at Babi Yar, during the World War II, thousands of Jews were killed there and some of them were choked under the ground.
In my great-great-mother’s home, a little black-and-white picture represented desert hill covered of dry grass. A little cross traced on the photograph indicated approximately the place where her sister Esfir was buried with her family.
This picture haunts me, but I’ve never seen it, and today it doesn’t exist anymore. I asked my mother to return to this family story, to make a gesture of memory.
Before the war, Esfir had a happy family, a husband and children. They lived in a Jewish neighborhood, close to the Babi Yar ravine to the north of Kiev.
The German army took Kiev on September 19 1941. And on September 29, at down thousands of Jews were marched in small groups to the Babi Yar ravine with their suitcases. They were preparing to the long trip.
Esfir, her husband and children were among them.
I’ve chosen the video, my medium of predilection, to tell this intimate and universal story. This video retraces a long morning trip: three portions were filmed in the present-day quarter. Babi Yar is an understated remembrance place, that deserted park seems to keep the scars of the earth.
The first time I’ve visited this place, it strikes me by its desolate and impersonal aspect. This video relates also my first painful impression through the arid form of the editing, the cold image colors, the dry cracklings in the soundtrack, the freezing notes in the sound design, the hardness of the words traced at the bottom of the screen.
This video work is funded on the story of my great-great-aunt I’ve never knew. But it is also an homage to all these massacred innocent people. I know almost nothing about Esfir and her family. Her sisters and brothers didn’t talk about them, about the Jewishness, about the war. They tried to forget and the Soviet policy tried to make them forget. And this video deals with these traces, snippets of memory.
The black-and-white picture and traced cross I was telling about was an invisible, virtual grave of Esfir. It was the only remaining trace of these people, their documents and personal stuffs were burned or stolen. But this picture doesn’t exist anymore. And the video “The scar of the earth” comes like a memorial act."
Macha Ovtchinnikova
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Macha Ovchinnikova is a French director and researcher of Russian origin. Doctor in film studies, she writes about cinema and contemporary art, and teaches at the university the aesthetics and practice of cinema and video art. She lives and works between Amiens and Paris.
Experimenting different film genres and mediums – documentary, fiction, experimental video – Macha Ovtchinnikova questions the notion of the time and its investment in the film forms: how should we show the memory exploration? How should we report in images and sounds, in words and silences on the human experience? The archive images from 1990’s, the women’s testimonies, the video projection in the space or on the mirror, images of contemporary urban landscapes constitute the raw material of her last films and future projects. The video work “The scar of the earth” relates a tragic episode of the history of the Holocaust in Kiev, through the arid form of the editing, the cold image colors, the dry cracklings in the soundtrack, the freezing notes in the sound design, the hardness of the words traced at the bottom of the screen.
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