DOCUDAYS 2020 - New Jerusalem
Ukrainian Cinema / СУКDirected by a duo of young documentary filmmakers, Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Himey, New Jerusalem, attempts to bring a camera along on a pilgrimage to Zarvanytsia, a small village in western Ukraine and home to an allegedly miracle-working icon of Mother of God. To many devout Ukrainian orthodox Christians, it is a place of similar religious gravitas to that of Fatima in Portugal or Częstochowa in Poland. Thus, it makes sense to educate the public at large about its existence, ponder its cultural significance and capture a slice of the Ukrainian society to whom Zarvanytsia is an important part of their spiritual life.
In fact, this latter aspect seems to be what interests the filmmakers the most. Following a popular approach to documentary filmmaking wherein very little – if anything – is explained via talking head interviews, animation or any form of externally applied exposition, the camera assumes a perspective of a fly on the wall or an invisible companion to the film’s assortment of subjects, pilgrims, and records their journey to this iconic place of worship. This is perhaps this film's biggest gamble, because it simply must succeed on the back of the people whom the filmmakers found interesting enough to film.
Unfortunately, it is completely unsuccessful because none of these characters are seemingly capable of carrying their share of the narrative load. Though, it is entirely possible the filmmakers didn’t find them compelling either because they gleefully jump from one to another without spending more than three minutes with each of them. This might be simply because there isn’t too much to be mined from an octogenarian lady who attends the pilgrimage every year, or a bearded thinker who offers unsolicited rants about his conviction that animals, while cute, have no souls and thus cannot go to heaven. Alternatively, the filmmakers weren’t interested to inquire about their subjects and fish out crucial nuance about their life experience which may have led them to this place. In fact, they treat them more like postcards than three-dimensional human beings.
Therefore, it is extremely difficult to find New Jerusalem narratively compelling or artistically moving. Harsh as it may come across, the entire film is unhealthily detached from its subject matter and maybe even somewhat cynical. This may have been a side effect of a purely aesthetic decision to observe without interfering, but it occasionally comes across as insincere. It is as though the filmmakers saw themselves as anthropological descendants of Jane Goodall learning about cultural patterns of certain human tribes, but they were too opinionated to engage with their subjects on an intellectual level. In fact, they may have even been giggling under their noses at their earnest religiosity, their willingness to see religious signs in nature or their complete conviction that miracles are real.
This film truly fails on all fronts. Its subject matter isn’t compelling enough to speak for itself and the filmmakers seem not to care about it either. It is, at best, an outlet for their craft-related aspirations and quite possibly a dangerously ironic look at a subsection of the Ukrainian society ensconced in the Christian tradition. In any case, New Jerusalem is an instructive example showing that for a movie to successfully function as cinéma vérité, it has to take its ‘vérité’ part seriously. Even a critical look at this innately intriguing facet of the human experience – unabashed religiosity still smouldering in remote places – must originate from an honest desire to tell a compelling story and, sadly, this simply isn’t the case. It is a collection of visual tableaus and snippets of social commentary that fail to form a coherent and engaging narrative. This might be because there isn’t one to be found here at all, or because the filmmakers had no interest or capacity to tease it out of the wall of noise generated by the multitude of characters they decided to film.
