With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Global Violence Prevention (GVP) SIG published an article on this blog laying out the devasting public health impacts on this war[1]. This sparked a discussion between the GVP SIG and the Film SIG about how we could collaborate to raise awareness of the public health impacts of violence through the medium of film.
This idea followed a successful collaboration between the GVP and Film SIGs in 2018, when they created an award-winning animation with Médecins Sans Frontières to mark to centenary of the 1918 pandemic and the end of the WWI[2][3].
To take the idea forward, we approached the Public Health Film Society (PHFS), a UK based charity[4]. The society’s Vice President Dr Olena Seminog is a medical doctor from Ukraine and has been involved in raising funds for medical assistance including the delivery of medical aid packages and first response vehicles. She also has a wide network of contacts within the film industry in Ukraine. She suggested a collaboration that would bring filmmakers from Ukraine together with UK public health practitioners interested in raising awareness about the public health impacts of the war.
The first fruits of this collaboration was a workshop at this year’s UK FPH SRC conference held this September in London. The SIGs and the PHFS invited filmmakers from Ukraine to share their experiences of ‘How to make a film in a warzone’. We were delighted to be joined by award winning director/ writer Alisa Kovalenko and producer Oksana Ivantsiv who showed clips of their films and shared their experiences of filming under dangerous circumstances at the frontline.
Alisa reflected on her experience filming in the east of Ukraine as a young filmmaker during the Euromaidan protests in 2014 and revisiting the sites later to document the lives and dreams of children growing up in the warzone just before the full-scale invasion in 2022.
Meanwhile Oksana described her latest film tracing the mental health toll of the war through the story of a veteran who took his own life and the aftermath for his family including the stigma faced as a result of his story.
The intimate discussions with the filmmakers reiterated the power that films have to put across important messages about the impact of war on children’s growth and mental health through individual stories from the frontline.
We hope that attendees at the workshop were inspired to think about how films could be used to tell important messages about the public health impact of their work. We also intend to build on this collaboration, bringing further insight into the public health impact of the Ukraine-Russian war.
In the meantime, if you are interested in the work of Alisa Kovalenko[5] or Oksana Ivantsiv[6], we have included links to their IMDB profiles in the references and a link to donate to the medical assistance program for Ukraine below.
FUNDRAISING FOR A REFRIGERATED VAN: https://a36.com.ua/en/200-2/
Uy Hoang (Chair FPH Film SIG)
Clare Oliver-Williams (Co-Chair FPH Global Violence Prevention SIG)
Daniel Flecknoe (Co-Chair FPH Global Violence Prevention SIG)
Olena Seminog (Vice President, Public Health Film Society)
The two films that were screened at the workshop were:
‘Alisa in Warland‘ by Alisa Kovalenko
‘No Obvious Signs‘ directed by Alina Gorlova and produced by Oksana Ivantsiv
REFERENCES
[1] https://betterhealthforall.org/2023/02/21/public-health-challenges-and-conflict-ukraine/
[2] https://www.fph.org.uk/policy-advocacy/special-interest-groups/special-interest-groups-list/global-violence-prevention-sig/
[3] https://twitter.com/uhoang/status/1140923469372301312
[4] https://publichealthfilms.org/
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