07/04/2017 - The country’s newly instigated Film Academy is readying the 1st edition of the National Film Awards, for which The Nest of the Turtledove and My Grandmother Fanny Kaplan are the frontrunners

The Nest of the Turtledove by Taras Tkachenko

The Odessa International Film Festival launched an initiative during its seventh edition in 2016, to create an association of professionals in the field of Ukrainian cinema. In 2017, the Ukrainian Film Academy was founded, with its primary goal being to promote and support national cinema. Boasting members drawn from all domains of the film industry, the academy established the National Film Awards in order to celebrate the achievements of national cinema and also to make Ukrainian cinema more approachable to the rest of the world, too.

All of the members of the academy are eligible to vote and choose the winners of the National Film Awards. The films will compete in 14 main categories, including Best Film, Best Director (the Yuri Ilyenko Award), Best Actor and Best Actress. The symbol that has been chosen for the awards is the Golden Dziga. Apart from its literal meaning – spinning top – which symbolises continuous effort, “Dziga” is also a direct reference to one of the founders of the documentary genre, Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929).

The frontrunners in the Golden Dziga nominations are The Nest of the Turtledove [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Taras Tkachenko and My Grandmother Fanny Kaplan [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Alena Demyanenko, with eight and seven nominations, respectively. The first Ukrainian National Film Awards ceremony will be held on 20 April in Kyiv, Ukraine, with Polish film director Krzysztof Zanussi as guest of honour. The eighth Odessa International Film Festival will be held from 14-22 July 2017 in Odessa, Ukraine.