The Invisible University for Ukraine cordially invites you to a film screening and discussion.
Film: The Hamlet Syndrome (dir. Elwira Niewiera, Piotr Rosołowski; 2022)
Discussion: Roza Sarkisian & Nadiia Chervinska (CEU) & Kateryna Osypchuk (CEU)
A few months before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, film directors Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosolowski brought together the Ukrainian theater maker Roza Sarkisian and five young compatriots in an atmospheric theater to create a performance blending Shakespeare’s Hamlet with the performers’ reality.
Like Hamlet, Yaroslav, Kateryna, Rodion, Oksana, and Roman also face great existential dilemmas. “To live or not to live,” is Yaroslav’s twist on “to be or not to be”, as he reflects on his physical—and almost fatal—involvement in the battle in the Donbas region in 2014. Kateryna and Roman also fought in that war, while Oksana and Rodion fight as feminists and members of the LGBTQ community in a conservative, intolerant society.
In The Hamlet Syndrome, the depiction of the intense theatrical process is complemented by portraits of the five protagonists: breathtaking insights into their personal lives, in which trauma and raw pain increasingly come to the surface.
Roza Sarkisian is a Theatre director and Curator. She graduated from the Theatre Directing Department at the I. P. Kotlyarevski National University of Arts in Kharkiv (2012) and from the Political Sociology Department at the V. N. Karazin National University in Kharkiv (2009). In the years of 2017 -2019 Roza worked as the Head Theatre Director of the First Ukrainian Academic Theatre for Children and Youth in Lviv. In the years of 2017 -2019 she worked as the Theatre Director on the House in Ivano-Frankivsk National Academic Drama and Music Theatre. Her productions, dealing with the topics of collective memory, national identity, political manipulation, non-normativity and social oppression have won several awards and invitations to many festivals in Ukraine (including Gogol Fest in Kyiv , 2014 and 2016; Urban Exploration Lviv Fest 2014; GaliciaKult in Kharkiv, 2016; Terra Futura in Kherson, 2016; Startup Gogol Fest in Mariupol 2017; the Golden Lion in Lviv, 2018; Parade Fest in Kharkiv, 2018 and 2019; Svitohliad in Severodonieck, 2019) and in Poland: Desant.UA Festival in Warsaw, 2017; Close Strangers Festival in Poznań, 2019. Roza is a winner of the British Council Ukraine competition "Taking the Stage 2017", as well as the Gaude Polonia scholarship of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland in 2017, International Mobility Grant “Culture Bridges” and the Artistic Scholarship from the President of Ukraine in 2019/2020. She also won a "City of Lviv Personality of the Year 2018” award in the category of Theatre. She has been an initiator, curator and director of numerous art and education projects for teenagers, such as festivals “Drama Teen Lab” and “Young Directors for Children”, realized at the First Theatre in Lviv, or "Voices of Neighborhood". She also has led numerous workshops for teenagers and created the performances with young non-professional actors and people with a disability.
Image: The Hamlet Syndrome/Facebook