ECG Productions

11/14/2025

https://ecgproductions.ca/transforming-anger-into-art-inside-from-violence-to-violins/

Transforming Anger into Art — Inside From Violence to Violins https://ecgproductions.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/hammer_band1.jpg 768 1024 ECG Productions ECG Productions https://ecgproductions.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/hammer_band1.jpg November 13, 2025 November 13, 2025 November 13, 2025 n...

11/03/2025

🕯️ In Memory of Ida Shchupak

The stories of people whose lives were touched by the Gulag system were among the first we began to record when we started work on the project “GULAG. Witnesses.”
The story of Ida Shchupak was one of the very first — and perhaps one of the most moving.

Sometimes memory lives in objects — in a photograph, a line in a letter, or a painting made by someone who shared your pain and your faith.
Ida’s story is one of those.
She carried through her life not only the sorrow for her father, a Gulag prisoner, but also the love he left her — a love stronger than fear, hunger, the camps, and years of silence.

Born in Bobruisk, Ida lived through evacuation, Siberia, cold, and famine.
As a child, she was afraid to say aloud that her father was an “enemy of the people.”
Her father, Mikhail Naftolin, was a frontline soldier, wounded near Bryansk, later captured, and then arrested and sentenced under Article 58.

In the camp, surrounded by cold and despair, he asked a fellow prisoner — an artist — to paint a portrait of his little daughter from a photograph.
In the lower corner, he wrote: “To my dear little daughter Idachka, from your loving daddy. Uglich.”
When the portrait finally reached Ida, she carefully painted over the word “Uglich” with oil paint — so that no one would know where her father had been.
She carried that portrait through her entire life — from Bobruisk to Zaporizhzhia, and later to Canada.
It stood in her home among other things that preserved his memory.

Years later, in Canada, Ida began creating her own art — delicate pictures made from fish bones.
She used to say that each bone was like a human life: fragile, transparent, but when joined together — something living and beautiful could emerge.
She gave one of those shimmering, pearly, almost weightless artworks to each member of our filming crew.
One of them stands in our home today.
As a reminder of her.

A few days ago, Ida passed away.
I remember her voice, her eyes, her hands.
We send our deepest condolences to her sons — our friend, Ukrainian historian Ihor Shchupak, and his brother Yuriy.
The bright memory of their mother is not only a part of their family’s story.
It is part of all of ours.

🎞️ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsaHzScuSZ0

🌐 English version: gulagshadows.com/ida-shchupak

🌐 Ukrainian version: gulagshadows.com/uk/ida-shchupak

📜 Project website: gulagshadows.com

11/02/2025

🕊️ “Hour of Interview” with Gregory Antimony | Oleksandr Borodulya — The Soul of Ukrainian Dance

Recorded by our company in Toronto, this program is an open conversation with Oleksandr Borodulya, former soloist of the Virsky Ukrainian National Folk Dance Ensemble.
The interview is in Russian — as a form of counter-propaganda, with a fragile yet sincere hope to reach those who still live within Soviet myths and cannot grasp what the real Ukraine is.

🎥 In this conversation — the stage and the tours, the war with Russia, the people who refused to break, and Ukrainian dance as the soul of the nation, which can never be conquered.

We prepared transcripts in Ukrainian and English so that this voice — and the strength it carries — can be heard both in Ukraine and beyond its borders.

🔗 Watch the program:
👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgdE8tRPacQ&t=1s

📖 Ukrainian transcript:
👉 gregoryantimony.com/ru/oleksandr-borodulya

📖 English transcript:
👉 gregoryantimony.com/oleksandr-borodulya

11/02/2025

🕯️ The Return of Names — Memory Spoken Aloud

The annual “Return of Names” event takes place on the eve of Political Prisoner Day — October 30.
On this day in 1974, prisoners in the Mordovia and Perm labor camps declared a hunger strike to protest political repression in the USSR.

In Toronto, the action organized by Memorial has been held for many years near the Raoul Wallenberg Monument — dedicated to the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews during World War II and became a symbol of moral courage and human solidarity.

🕯️ Decades later, political prisoners still exist in Russia, and many are again forced to go on hunger strikes as one of the few remaining ways to draw attention to unbearable conditions and injustice.
Since September 25, 2025, human rights activist Mikhail Kriger has been on a hunger strike, protesting constant harassment — repeated solitary confinement on fabricated charges and deprivation of correspondence.

This year, participants of the action read aloud 1,506 names, 22 messages from today’s Russian political prisoners, and 12 names of people they personally wished to remember.
Thanks to volunteers and human rights defenders, the event took place in 95 cities across 37 countries.

🎞️ Recently, Memorial presented the animated short “My Dear Ones, I’m Writing to You From…”, created by the creative group East Pond.
It tells the story of letters that helped people survive in the GULAG and was made for the traveling exhibition “The Right to Correspondence.”
Based on archival materials from Memorial and the book of the same name, the film focuses not so much on the hardships of imprisonment as on the tiny spark of hope that came from staying connected to the outside world.

📩 Letters helped people survive then — and they can still do so today.
Writing to a prisoner, offering support, and sharing news is a way to keep silence from winning.

Watch the film on Memorial’s YouTube channel:
👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZw5W8xfhfo

11/01/2025

From October 17 to 24, the iconic Ukrainian short film festival BARDAK IX took place at the DRUK art basement — the only film festival in Kharkiv dedicated exclusively to Ukrainian cinema.

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/17KJG1bzHB/?mibextid=wwXIfr

The short musical film “Ivana Kupala” (produced by ECGProductions, directed by Yuliya Orlenko, cinematography by Serhiy Takhmazov) was screened in the non-competition section of the festival.
Yuliya made this film six months before Russia’s full-scale invasion, when life still felt peaceful, and Ukrainian folk songs sounded like a celebration of joy rather than a call to resistance.

During the filming, live songs performed by the Ukrainian folk group Bozhedary were recorded, creating a special, almost magical atmosphere.

The Bardak Festival is a true space of freedom and creativity. Its founder, Anton Frolov, now serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, continues to ensure that the festival lives on and inspires.

We sincerely thank the festival team and the Kharkiv audience for their warm welcome and support of Ukrainian cinema.

10/19/2025

🎬 The documentary project “Dovlatov: the Unknown Pages”, directed by our colleague Max Kravchinsky and with Artem Borodin as Director of Photography, is entering its final stage.

Last week, we filmed the final scene on the picturesque shore of Lake Ontario, with a stunning view of downtown in the background.
The last day of shooting is scheduled for mid-November, as we eagerly await the completion of a special prop — the details of which remain a surprise for now 👀✨

📺 The film will premiere on RTVi (Canada) early next year, followed by presentations in New York, Toronto, and Montreal.

10/16/2025

In Search of Pavlo Virsky
(Work on the new version of the film continues)

Our team continues archival research and the collection of new materials for the film about the legendary Pavlo Virsky Ensemble.
Director Olga Antimony has finally found what she was searching for — documents that shed light on little-known pages of the Virsky family’s history.

In the declassified archives of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), a file was discovered concerning Pavlo Virsky’s brother — Oleksii Pavlovych Virsky, born in 1903 in the village of Shyroke, Kherson Governorate.
In the 1930s, he worked in Odesa, heading the Department of Political Education of the Regional Department of Public Education.

On August 20, 1937, he was arrested.
The charges followed the standard formula of the time — participation in a counterrevolutionary Trotskyist organization and anti-Soviet agitation.
On September 28, 1937, the visiting session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced him to ex*****on by shooting, and the sentence was carried out the same day.

His wife, Taisiia Yefimivna Virska, was arrested as a “family member of an enemy of the people” and sent to labor camps in the Komi ASSR. All family property was confiscated.

At that time, Pavlo Virsky was already working in the theatre — staging productions, teaching, and gaining recognition.
After his brother’s arrest, he came under constant surveillance. For many years he lived with the stigma of being “a relative of an enemy of the people.”
Despite this, he continued his work and later founded the National Honored Academic Ensemble of Ukrainian Dance, which became a symbol of Ukrainian culture.

KGB archival materials confirm that Virsky and his ensemble remained under continuous supervision by the Soviet security services.
Before international tours, artists were briefed, and during their trips they were accompanied by KGB officers posing as translators. Reports recorded the smallest details — conversations, behavior, and contacts.

One episode from 1969 stands out: during the ensemble’s tour in Spain, Pavlo Virsky was photographed next to Otto Skorzeny, a former SS officer. Upon returning to Kyiv, an investigation was launched, but due to the intervention of party leadership, the matter was quietly closed.

Oleksii Virsky was fully rehabilitated in 1957.

These declassified documents reveal the historical context in which the Virsky family lived:
one brother executed in 1937, the other living for decades under surveillance — yet managing to preserve his art and create a dance legacy that became part of Ukraine’s cultural identity.

#Танець #Вірський

10/02/2025

Myroslava Oleksiuk: A Voice of Ukrainian Culture in the Diaspora
Recently, we had the privilege of meeting and recording an interview with Myroslava Oleksiuk — a director, cultural activist, and a woman who has spent decades ensuring that the Ukrainian voice could be heard in the world.

Her life reflects the path of the Ukrainian diaspora: from childhood in an émigré family, where preserving language and memory was a necessity, to years of work in cinema and cultural projects. Growing up far from her homeland, Myroslava understood that culture itself could be a way of survival — through words, cinema, theater, and music.

In the 1970s and 80s, she undertook the ambitious project of filming “Virsky. Spirit of Ukraine.” For the Ukrainian diaspora, it was a breakthrough — for the first time, a major film sought to capture not Soviet officialdom, but the authentic beauty and power of Ukrainian dance. She recalls the enormous challenges of that time: constant pressure from the KGB, censorship, and surveillance. Even accessing archives was a battle. Yet the Ukrainian community in Canada stood beside her — helping, funding, preserving, and encouraging.

Her testimony is not only about cinema. It is about how Ukrainians abroad became a voice of truth when that truth was silenced at home. She speaks of the weight of responsibility, when in exile one had to be both an artist and a chronicler, a witness and a guardian.

“Every reel of film felt like resistance. We were preserving Ukraine’s spirit on screen while they tried to erase it at home.”

“Being abroad did not free us from responsibility. On the contrary — it gave us the duty to speak louder for those who could not.”

She remembers with pain how cultural projects of Ukrainians in Canada were branded “hostile” by the Soviet state, and how any uncensored Ukrainian word was immediately condemned as “nationalism.” But running through her story is also strength — the strength of those who refused to let Ukrainian culture be erased.

Today, her words resonate with even greater urgency. What she fought for decades ago — Ukraine’s right to its own voice, its memory, its culture — is now being defended on the battlefield, in films, in books, and in everyday life.

🎥 This interview will become an important part of our project, which connects history with the present: how the diaspora safeguarded the Ukrainian word, and how Ukraine today fights for the right to speak it freely.

10/02/2025

1933–2025. A History That Repeats Itself

Air raid sirens are sounding again in Kyiv.
In September alone, Russia launched 5,638 drones and 185 missiles against Ukraine.

Our team in Toronto continues work on the documentary series “GULAG. Witnesses.” We are recording the voiceover for the episode 1932–1933: HUNGER AS A WEAPON. How the Ukrainian village was destroyed.

🎙 Actress — Oksana Smilska
🎬 Director — Olga Antimony
🎚 Sound Engineer — Myroslav Delev

📖 At the heart of this story is the diary of a village schoolteacher, Alexandra Nikolaevna Radchenko (born 1896, near Izium, Kharkiv region). She was 36 years old when the Famine began.

It is difficult. To read someone else’s diary 92 years later. To read the lines of a person who wrote while children were dying around her and adults were forced to become “less than human” just to survive.

As we sat in a small studio room, voicing her words aloud, we lived together with HER.
We — who know about the Famine only from history books and the stories of our grandparents.
Here, it is the voice of one real person.
Her thoughts. Her pain. Her sense of that time.
No longer an abstract history — but a living human being with whom you feel related as you read and listen.

And it is impossible not to think about today.
Then — hunger, imposed by Moscow.
Today — missiles, deaths, ruined homes.
History repeats itself.

Why must Ukraine suffer?
That question sounds just as sharp today as it did ninety years ago.

#ГУЛАГСвідки #ГУЛАГСвидетели #ГолодоморУкраина #ОльгаАнтимоні #ОксанаСмільська

09/26/2025

At the Ukrainian Festival this month we captured a powerful scene for our documentary CODE 450: our main character Marichka performing live with Daughters of Donbas. Equally unforgettable, Oksana Smilska gave voice to the heartbreaking stories of children kidnapped during the war—her words held the audience in silence. It felt as if the sky itself echoed the strength of her music—an unforgettable moment that will become a key part of the film.
We’re now moving into the final stages of production.
Huge thanks to Marichka for an incredible performance and for sharing her story with such courage.
Directed by our talented colleague Olena Tumanska.
#

09/09/2025

🇺🇦 We Continue to Support Ukraine
https://www.facebook.com/share/174gB566oj/
We do this together with our friends whom the war has brought into our lives.
📅 For ten years now, month after month, we have been standing by those affected. As long as people keep dying, we cannot remain indifferent.
🙏 Join us in helping. Every action matters.

09/09/2025

Once an artist — always an artist!

After recording an episode of The Interview Hour with Oleksandr Borodulia, artist of the Pavlo Virsky National Ensemble.

Once an artist — always an artist! Even years after leaving the stage, you can still feel the breath of performance, the spirit of the ensemble, and the love for art in every movement and every glance.

Today, Oleksandr lives in Canada, but he remains Ukrainian — not just by passport, but in soul, in heart, in every gesture and every word. Ukraine lives within him, no matter where he is.

Dance is not just a profession. It’s a state of soul that stays with you forever.