by Sixstrings » Sat 10 Oct 2015, 17:28:03
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', 'T')he question is, who financed it? From the look of the trailer the Maiden folks are wonderful and the elected government they threw out was horrible, but where is the truth? We have folks on this board shouting in favor of each side and as a total outsider I can't tell who is right and who is wrong, or even if both were wrong in a different way but still wrong.
Director's name is Evgeny Afineevsky. Wiki says "produced in part" by Netflix, probably a deal with British tv too and it's had limited release in film festivals.
To answer your question, about "what is the truth," PART of the truth is right there in the documentary.
There really were millions of Ukrainians that were not political per se, but they just saw themselves as European. The documentary accurately lays the events out. Yanukovich first won president but it was a rigged election, and he was forced to step down. Then he won election again and this time it was legit, and also he had promised EU association agreements so that's how he won, that's what people wanted.
Then he backed out at the last minute. He said at the time it was under pressure from Putin. Don't we all remember this? We, on this forum, saw all this play out step by step at the time.
The documentary interviews just regular people, that were protesting. Like a young woman that says what Yanu did was not just taking the country back, but "going all the way back to my grandparents' time, the USSR" and she didn't want any part of that.
A lot of pro Russia people want to deny and obfuscate and talk about other things, but at the core of it all the bottom line is that Ukraine is a former USSR country that was moving westward and they already had several orange revolutions and they don't ever want to go back to a "USSR" or a warsaw pact or anything like that -- they are as firm about being European, as Polish people are, and those in the Baltics, and Latvians and Lithuanians etc. etc.
Once free, people never want to go back again, not willingly anyway.
People can't deny THEIR rights and try to tell them what to do, all to accommodate Russian views. There are at minimum two sides to the story, and Ukraine is not perfect in totality any more than America or Britain is.
Tanada, was there a perfect and clear "right and wrong" in our own American Revolution? At the time, our own people were 50-50 split on it with half being loyalists to the Crown. So yeah, there were two sides to a story, but only a total pro loyalist would have completely discounted the half of Americans that wanted to be free.
I don't know if there is a "perfect" and a "right and wrong," it's actually debatable, even about our own revolution against Britain. But what one really cannot do, being a foreigner from another place, is try to tell so many people that THEY don't have a right to feel as they do and if they say the USSR is from their grandparents' time and they don't want Russian domination and they say they want the future and they see themselves as European and they want European norms and to be a place like Denmark or whatever, then that is what THEY want and nobody can say they shouldn't want it.
Because those are GOOD things, that they want. They're normal things, that we in the West that already have them, take so much for granted.
They are Ukrainians, it's their country, not ours and not Russia's.
It would be like someone trying to tell Americans that we have to be British again, just because maybe the UK wanted us to. Well we wouldn't do that, would we, no matter what, right? That's how these western ukrainians are, about the USSR. They won't go back. Never again. They're bitterly opposed to it, just as the rest of east europe is. (mostly, though there's a pro Putin far right winger dictatorish leader in Hungary)
Even Russia's ally BELARUS is very WARY of Russia. The people don't want to be back in any kind of USSR. They recently said NO to Putin wanting to build an air base there. They said that would be like "Russian occupation."
Tanada, you said it's hard to figure out who "is right and wrong."
If someone is an American, or a Brit, or European, then the right and wrong is clear.
We support democracy and "being European" and "being American." That's our way of life, our culture, our ideology, and it's not all BS and it's all what we are about. So if east Europeans want to model after us rather than live under dictatorships, then for me anyway, it's clear where the right is and where the wrong is.
Anyhow, their revolution is long over now and they've got a new pro west government and they're in the western bloc and that's settled.
Now it's just a question of whether Putin starts chewing up more territory again this coming winter.
Now it's jut a matter of how much help and support Ukraine gets, economic and otherwise, from the other democracies in the world. Or if we just want to ignore it still, because "our boat is all full up," and we can't take any more east europeans on or do anything for them. And then maybe one day nato is having to defend the line in, say, France or Denmark, or maybe Russian fighter jets and bombers crossing American airspace just as they have all these countries in Europe and now Turkey too.
Right and wrong? Democracy is what's right, with constitutions and human rights and our kind of society that we have in the West, and dictatorship is what is wrong.
Our own country, the USA, was founded in opposition to dictatorship and tyranny. It is what we are about. That's what freedom is, and it's not cheesey or BS, it's a very real concern when a place does not have it and has a brutal dictator or king instead.I don't care what Noam Chomsky or anyone else says about it, and we are not perfect, but this is our way of life. Democracy. Constitutions. Rule of law. The Western Way, the European way, the American way.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')hrilling Netflix Documentary 'Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom' to Premiere October 9
"Evgeny has assembled a cinematic tribute to the heroism, spirit and determination of the Ukrainian people," said Lisa Nishimura, Netflix VP of Original Documentary Programming. "We are honored to provide a global platform for him to share his powerful narrative."
The Venice Film Festival runs from September 2-12. Netflix users can check online on October 9 to watch the documentary.
http://www.indiewire.com/article/thrilling-netflix-documentary-winter-on-fire-ukraines-fight-for-freedom-to-premiere-october-9-20150806 $this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')inter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom is a 2015 documentary film,
Produced in part by Netflix, the film is set to debut 2015-10-09 on the online streaming service, having played at various film festivals beforehand.[2]