2020 documentary film
The Earth Is Blue as an Orange is a 2020 documentary film, directed and written by Iryna Tsilyk, who won the Directing Award in the "World Cinema Documentary” category for the film at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.
Synopsis.
Single mother Hanna and her four children live in the front-line war zone of Donbas, Ukraine. While the outside world is made up of bombings and chaos, the family is managing to keep their home as a safe haven, full of life and full of light. Every member of the family has a passion for cinema, motivating them to shoot a film inspired by their own life during a time of war.
The creative process raises the question of what kind of power the magical world of cinema could have during times of disaster. How to picture war through fiction? For Hanna and the children, transforming trauma into a work of art is the ultimate way to stay human.
Production.
The film is produced by Anna Kapustina ("Albatros Communicos", Ukraine) and Giedrė Žickytė ("Moonmakers", Lithuania) with the support of Ukrainian State Film Agency, Lithuanian Film Centre, IDFA Bertha Fund (Netherlands).
Release.
It was selected for the official program of 2020 Berlin International Film Festival (Generation 14+), the 2020 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (Best of Fests), Documentary Selection by European Film Academy 2020, , 2020 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, 2020 Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, 2020 Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, 2020 Adelaide Film Festival and more than 100 other International film festivals.
The film had theatrical distribution in Ukraine, Lithuania, France, Italy.
Reception.
"The Earth Is Blue as an Orange" has an approval rating of 93% on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 14 reviews, and an average rating of 8.2/10. Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 78 out of 100, based on 5 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
Guy Lodge, writing for "Variety", wrote, "It’s an apt inversion for a documentary in which the roles of filmmaker, viewer and subject are as inextricably fused as life and art". Amber Wilkinson of "Screen International" wrote, "Iryna Tsilyk offers an intimate and surprisingly playful family’s eye view of life in the Ukraine warzone in her debut feature documentary, which focuses on the Trofymchuk-Gladky clan".
References.
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