Common People | Don’t Worry, the Doors Will Open (2019)

We are happy to announce the start of the fourth “Common People”—the screening series of documentary films initiated by the Kaunas Artists’ House and the platform “Kitas Kinas”.

The Common People 2022 program examines the individual’s relationship with the environment and the landscape in which they live and work. We will look at the landscape as a factor generating social, political, and ecological meanings. The program’s films will reveal not only the beauty or issues of landscapes but also the contexts in which they exist, as well as their positive or negative influence on the individual and vice versa. Travelling from idyllic provincial landscapes to polluted metropolises, we will focus on historical layers of the environment, ecological and personal human tragedies, and social issues. We will try to understand how the relationship between man and space changes in the face of today’s challenges.

THE OPENING FILM

October 20 at 7 p.m., the Common People program will be opened by a screening of Oksana Karpovych’s film “Don’t Worry, The Doors Will Open”. The film reveals the everyday life of the Ukrainian working class, travelling by train from the surrounding towns to work in Kyiv and back. The film sensitively and atmospherically reveals the complex realities of post-Soviet Ukrainian society. The camera follows people and their stories from wagon to wagon, station to station, and night to day.

More about the film:

Shot over summer and winter seasons on elektrychkas, typical Soviet commuter trains that travel between the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and small provincial towns, “Don’t Worry, The Doors Will Open” invites us to share a ride with the working class, mostly marginalised passengers and vendors. Following several people from one grimy wagon to another, from station to station, from day to night, we are immersed in the daily struggles of their lives in a post-Soviet country. “Don’t Worry, The Doors Will Open” is an atmospheric and intensely human portrait of Ukrainian society on the move. Filmed during a complicated time, the film is a look at the human condition and an intimate point of view on the history of independent Ukraine as the common people experience it.

Oksana Karpovych is a film writer, director and photographer born in Kyiv, living and working between Kyiv and Montreal. Her debut feature documentary film “Don’t Worry, the Doors Will Open” won the New Visions Award at RIDM in 2019, received an honourable mention at Hot Docs and played at numerous film festivals. In her personal projects, Karpovych explores the common people’s everyday lives and oral histories and how state politics invades the personal sphere and influences the communities she intimately documents. Karpovych is a Cultural Studies graduate of the “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” National University in Ukraine and a Film Production graduate of Concordia University in Montreal. She is currently staying and working in Kyiv.

Documentary, Canada, Ukraine, 2019. Ukrainian with English and Lithuanian subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing, 76 min.

PARTICIPATION AT THE EVENT IS FREE OF CHARGE

Before every film preview, there will be discussions with various experts in different fields of interest.

The Common People screening series aims to discuss the content of documentary films and the whole notion of documentary cinema. The series addresses questions of ethics and directorial decisions. To film or not to film? When does a director cross the line of closeness with their subject? Should documentary cinema reflect ‘reality’ or the vision of its creator? These questions and others are raised and discussed by looking at films that closely look at people telling their own stories: sensitive, creative, eccentric and based somewhere in the margins.

The project is curated by Karolis Žukas (Kitas Kinas) and Edvinas Grinkevičius (Kaunas Artists’ House).

Visual identity: Eglė Simonavičiūtė.

The project is financed by the Lithuanian Film Center and organised by Kaunas Artists’ House. Partners: platform Kitas Kinas and Kaunas Deaf Rehabilitation Centre.