Ukrainian Sheriffs

Ukrainian Sheriffs (2016)

Українські шерифи

Well, someone needs to do the job

Driving in their yellow Lada flying its own little Ukrainian flag, they travel from incident to incident – calming an angry neighbor, investigating the discovery of a body, struggling to unfold a stroller and attempting to re-integrate Vova, the freeloader who eats other people’s dogs but actually longs for a normal existence – just like everyone else here. The seasons pass until political developments reach the village by way of the TV screen, sowing separatist discord.

Date of release
2016-03-26
TMDB
7.0 / 10 (8)
Runtime
1h 25m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Roman Bondarchuk

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 1. Including: 100 best films in the history of Ukrainian cinema

Ukrainian Sheriffs is a 2015 Ukrainian documentary film directed by Roman Bondarchuk. The film begins as a portrait of a small town which tries to meet its own policing needs but shifts when the Russo-Ukrainian War begins, depicting the war's effects in microcosm. Bondarchuk's first feature-length film, it was workshopped and developed at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam IDFAcademy and the Dok.incubator program.

Production

Ukrainian Sheriffs was produced by Daryna Averchenko for DocuDays South (Ukraine), and co-produced by Uldis Cekulis for VFS Films (Latvia), Irena Taskovski for Taskovski Films (Germany), and Tania Georgieva for German television. Six European TV channels were involved in the production, and the film also received support from the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) Bertha Fund (Eastern Europe).

Most of the film was shot from summer 2013 to summer 2014, which covered the period of the Maidan Revolution, the annexation of Crimea, and the beginning of the War in Donbas. From the extended shoots, nearly 200 hours of footage covered the sheriffs' investigations, duties, and daily lives. This was initially edited into small episodes with a first cut that was five hours in length and remained over two hours in length until its sixth cut.

A final cut of 88 minutes was assembled by Bondarchuk and co-editor Kateryna Gornostai, with sound by Borys Peter and original music by Anton Baibakov. A 52-minute edit was made for television. Dialogue is in Russian and Ukrainian.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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