Review of Bitter Harvest (2017) by Adrianna G — 02 Mar 2017

Positives: Irons and Barks are beautiful in this - and beautiful together. The scenes of Ukrainian village celebration are lovely. The special effects (battle and fire scenes) are well done. The music is great.

Negatives: it pains me to be negative -- because I so want to support a movie with the noble idea of bringing to light this horrific historical event alongside a message of love -- but please: get the history right! One moment a guy is galloping into the village saying "They killed the Tsar" (that would be 1918) and a little while later we get the death of Lenin (1924) and then a scene of forced collectivization (which began in 1929) and then the action turns to the horrific forced starvation of 1932-3. That's fifteen (15!) years of history, while the characters seem to have lived about two -- at most five -- years in their lives. Guys, if you want people to be aware of the event, don't blur the timeline!

Next, the movie is trying to do two things that work against each other: to show the horror of the Holodomor *and* to show how irrepressibly and impossibly brave the Ukrainians were. Because the movie chooses to pursue the latter through almost comically impossible escapes and triumphs, the immense horror of the event itself, the sheer impossibility of escape, gets trivialized. I recommend looking at some historical footage of the starvation -- even 30 seconds of glimpsing the real starvation will cause viewers to recoil at the hunger-lite version the movie needs to adopt in order to sustain its protagonists' indomitability.

And yet there were *so many* possibilities here ... had the movie only slowed down a bit and looked inward, focusing on a smaller action allowed to develop against the backdrop of the Holodomor.

Fleeting bits are interesting -- especially the fleeting reference to Walter Duranty (which no one will get because the flash of the newspaper is so quick) the New York Times correspondent who, meeting personally with Stalin, became a Soviet falsifier, but whose Soviet apologetics was instrumental in concealing this genocide for decades (Malcolm Muggeridge called Duranty "the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism" [Robert Conquest, *Harvest of Sorrow." Oxford, 1986, p. 320). If you are interested in the history, Conquest's account is the definitive one, praised by Solzhenitsyn among others.

For trying hard and for capturing the earnest sweetness of young love, I'll go for three stars. And maybe it will even pique interest those to go and research the event itself. Start with Conquest's book.