Editorial Review

The director calls his baroque opus a "filmic poem" dedicated to Cossack leader Mazepa. This form was the "only possible alternative to the curse on the great leader Mazepa". For a short period of independence of the Ukraine from Russia in the 17th century, he had fought side by side with Carl XII from Sweden against Peter the Great. After that, Mazepa vanished from the "official" history books. Illienko shows Mazepa as a Ukrainian hero of the people and doesn't shy away from absurd surreal or drastic image compositions. In the centre stands a sumptuously loaded table, a metaphor for the feast of life and death, because in the director's own words "the film is a phantasmagoric dream about the bloody feast of three huge phantoms of European culture: Czar Peter the Great, Swedish King Carl XII and Hetman Mazepa." Recently at the Berlinale, the work inspired discussions about the nationalistic tendencies.

Press Conference in Kyiv

Yuriy Illienko presided at the press conference, keeping it in an aggressively assertive vein. He attributed the picture’s failure to a belated preview by the festival’s selection committee. As for his picture, Mr. Illienko said one of the biggest problems was Mazepa’s enigmatically elusive character, which is known to have been interpreted in at least three different ways in world literature – as a traitor, rebel, and heroic lover.

The movie’s premiere date in Ukraine is expected in September, seven months after the film festival. The run in Ukraine requires special arrangements, as very few movie theatres have Dolby equipment. Finally, a promotional campaign will be launched on a few TV channels.

Turning to the numerically small part of the audience asking and taping questions during the press conference, Yuriy Illienko, telling about the massacre scene in Baturyn, noted casually, “I needed 15,000 dead bodies, but where would I get that many? We don’t have that many journalists.” And the relations between the film crew and critics promise to be anything but simple.

The Washington Post, October 2, 2002; Page c01, abridged

"A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa," Ukraine's biggest-budget feature film since the nation declared its independence in 1991, boasts little of the subtlety of highbrow post-Soviet cinema from Russia and none of the escapism mass-produced by Hollywood. It will not stir young girls like "Titanic" or young boys like another "Star Wars" instalment.

For Ukraine, "Prayer" has become part of the ongoing search for national identity in a place still rediscovering ahistory wiped out by generations of foreign rule.

Illienko put together "A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa" only by enlisting help of the government, which contributed a share of the $2.3 million production costs, a fortune by Ukrainian standards. The movie debuted at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year and premiered in the United States at a showing at Harvard University in August. After months of hype and debate, it hits the screens in Ukraine for the first time this month.

"Prayer" may confuse foreign audiences. It is not a linear narrative intended to represent reality, but rather a 152-minute "phantasmagoric dream of history," as Illienko put it, a circus hall of mirrors in which characters and scenes are twisted, warped, distorted. The special effects are comically crude, almost as if in a stage play -- a tide of red paint to represent blood, porcelain statues mixed in with real actors to represent a battlefield of corpses.

Reviews have been mixed. "Variety", the bible of the American film industry, panned it. While finding "moments of strange beauty in the midst of all the cacophony," it complained that Illienko had shown "an almost amateurish disregard for audience sensibilities" and declared that "his indigestible style here dooms what could have been an impressive saga."

A scholar who teaches Ukrainian at a Harvard summer institute, described it as "a kind of Freudian foray into the human psyche," though he too lamented that it was not a more reality-based portrayal akin to Mel Gibson's "Braveheart." Yet he wrote that the desire for entertainment "does not override the desire to understand exactly why Ukrainians seem so doomed to relive the same national failure over and over again."