KING LEAR

Duration: 70 min.

Genre: cross-media project

Production: InsightMedia

Director: Dmytro Hreshko

Stage director: Viacheslav Yehorov

DoP: Dmytro Hreshko

Producers: Andriy Suyarko, Volodymyr Filippov, Polina Herman

Due to Russia's war invasion of Ukraine, tens of thousands of Ukrainians escaping the war, they found refuge in a small town in western Ukraine.
The local director decides to involve non-professional actors-migrants in the embodiment of his old dream - to stage the play "King Lear".

On February 24, 2022, a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began. Millions of Ukrainians were forced to flee their homes and save themselves from the horrors of the war. Many of them took refuge in the small western Ukrainian town of Uzhhorod in Transcarpathia, which borders four EU countries.

With the flow of displaced people, various community initiatives are emerging in the city to help those who have been forced to leave their homes and find themselves in a different environment. As a rule, the migrants themselves take an active part in such activities. They work in canteens that feed migrants for free, weave camouflage nets, entertain and educate children, and organize cultural events.

Vyacheslav Yehorov, a local activist who works with his wife to help displaced people and organizes children's leisure time, decides to realize his long-held dream of staging Shakespeare's King Lear. The actors of his theater will be amateur actors – displaced people.

Former teachers, artists, engineers, sales assistants, and housewives are adapting to new conditions and learning to find themselves in new realities. The theatre play helps them find themselves and their destiny in a new world where the war is happening, and the director finds an answer to the eternal question of what love is and why this world should not perish.

The KING LEARE: HOW WE LOOKED FOR LOVE DURING THE WAR project is a cross-media project that combines two main directions: stage art and audiovisual. As a theatrical performance, it will begin with a premiere scheduled for the end of May at the Uzhhorod Palace for Children and Youth. This place became a refuge for many Ukrainians during the war.

We have started negotiations to show this play in other venues in Transcarpathia and abroad: in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, and the Baltic States.

In addition to traditional performances in theaters, we consider performances as a tourist attraction, when theatrical action takes place not on stage, but in real objects, such as castles or palaces, and spectators become direct participants in the action and watch the story by following the characters of the play in the different locations.

The first such site, which has already agreed to provide its capabilities, will be Palanok Castle in Mukachevo.

As for the documentary, which constantly accompanies the process, it will have its own media life, which is already beginning to take shape. Currently, the producers of the project begin to present it at international forums. The project is registered on the B2B platform (Baltic to Black Sea Documentary Network) the organization, whose activities aim to support documentary projects in Eastern Europe and promote them on the international market. Even the first mention of the project in professional circles aroused great interest of the audience and created an atmosphere of loyalty to the film, which in the end should arouse the interest of film festivals and other channels of documentary film distribution.

Dmytro Hreshko: I met the beginning of the war in the capital of Ukraine - Kyiv, where I’d lived for the last 2 years. Having woken up from the explosions, together with my girlfriend and friends, with the roar of jets and rocket explosions, we drove from the capital to Transcarpathia, my homeland. This way I became an internally displaced person, like the other 11 million Ukrainians who were forced to relocate to safer areas of the country or go abroad.

Later, I started filming the volunteer movement and collecting life stories of the displaced people who settled in various parts of Uzhhorod - schools, kindergartens, gyms.

This way, together with Vyacheslav Yehorov, a theater director, whom I have known for many years, and producer Andriy Suyarko, we came up with an idea to create a play where all characters will be played by relocated people.

The process of filming the project has already begun, and 11 actors have been selected through casting. The life and character of the displaced people are revealed through the process of rehearsals. Who are they, what do they want, what unites them and how will the theatrical project affect them and will they be able to embody their characters?

Exploring the characters of the film, I learn a lot about myself and how fragile life and our world are.

Together with the characters, we will go from the inception to realization of the play where everyone tries something for the first time, tries to stage a play for the first time, become an actor for the first time and find something that gives us the strength to move on. And perhaps in the midst of war, chaos and the unknown, we will find love.