Film screening followed by a Q&A session
Following the film screening, Yuri Shevchuk, Lecturer in Ukrainian at Columbia University and leading expert in the history of Ukrainian film, will discuss the award-winning documentary, The Guardian of the Past (dir. Malgorzata Potocka, 2004). The film is about art curator Borys Voznytsky, who fought relentlessly under Soviet tyranny to preserve some twelve thousand works of sacred art, hidden at the St. Bernard Monastery in Olesko, Ukraine until today. Voznytsky devoted his life to Ukrainian and Polish art, traveling around Ukraine and its abandoned churches in search of neglected icons, liturgical objects, and other remnants of religious art.
Borys Voznytsky (1926-2012) was a revered art historian, long-time director of the Lviv National Art Gallery, honorary member of the Academy of Arts of Ukraine, doctor emeritus of the Kraków Pedagogical Academy, and chairman of the Ukrainian National Committee of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). The collection of the Lviv National Art Gallery boasts a large selection of sculptures by the Ukrainian Baroque sculptor Johann Georg Pinzel, known among researchers as the "Slavic Michelangelo." The exhibition Johann Georg Pinsel: Un sculpteur baroque en Ukraine au XVIIIe siecle, was on display at the Louvre in Paris through February 25, 2013, and "would have not taken place without [Borys Voznytsky's] many years of work," said the curator Hilem Scherf.
Malgorzata Maria Potocka (b. 1953) is a Polish actress, director, photographer, and producer. Her work has been shown in Warsaw, Kraków, Paris, Budapest and New York. She is a member of Society for Creators of Culture and the Polish Filmmakers’Association since 1980, involved in promoting Polish art and culture abroad.
Sponsored by: Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures (University of Michigan), Ukrainian Film Club of Columbia University, Ukrainian Studies Fund (Wayne State University)
