Sashko Protyah
(Ukraine, 2022, 32 min., Ukrainian with English subtitles)
Saturday, September 23, 1pm
Shemin Auditorium, Shaffer Art Building
My Favourite Job is an experimental film documenting the practices of a volunteer group that evacuated people from Mariupol in the spring of 2022, when the city was surrounded by Russian troops and civilian targets were heavily bombed daily. They meet after each trip to share information, support each other, and talk about their traumatic experiences. The film includes images from the volunteers’ mobile phone videos, the filmmaker’s personal archive, and animation models: images that evidence ex negativo the warfare-influenced ban on the circulation of images of Mariupol. Any documentation is made under extreme danger of getting killed at the hands of the occupying army, since the said photo or video may contain evidence of war crimes. The unrated first-perspective videos of mass destructions that appear in the beginning of the film were recorded and carried out of Mariupol at the operators’ own risk.