One generation, two worlds

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/12/2001 (8948 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WHEN asked who will go to see their movies, film-makers almost invariably say: “Everybody.”

John Paskievich is no exception.

One cannot blame him. It is not the job of a documentary-maker to limit his audience.

But certainly, there is a case to be made that his new National Film Board-produced documentary My Mother’s Village reflects the experience of many first- and second-generation immigrants who have, for some reason or another, been exiled from their homeland.

“Various other people have seen it,” Paskievich says while indulging in the twin vices of coffee and cigarettes recently at a Main Street Salisbury House.

That would put My Mother’s Village in the same anthropological category as his other films, such as The Gypsies of Svinia and If Only I Were an Indian, which also examined questions of cultural identity.

But his new work is more personal and very particular to the Canadian-Ukrainian experience. It is as specific as the smell of perogies and onions frying in a north end kitchen. It is as specific as the sound of a balalaika bouncing off the auditorium walls of a Ukrainian dance recital. It is as specific, in fact, as Paskievich himself.

And that’s why the 53-year-old Winnipegger is a presence on both sides of the camera in the shot-on-video documentary, which has a week-long run at Cinematheque beginning next Friday.

Paskievich’s film is about the cultural, emotional and moral legacy Ukrainian immigrants bequeath their second-generation children. In fact, Paskievich refrained from interviewing first-generation immigrants, including his mother, whose participation is limited to the title.

“I didn’t want to interview the older people,” he says. “They were the source of memory and history. They’re the ones who were ripped out of their homes and sent away. But the effect of that on the kids was what I was after. That was my focus.”

In the course of the film, he does not give undue emphasis on his own experience, although we do learn that he was born in an Austrian camp for “displaced persons” shortly after the Second World War. He and his parents, sponsored by a farmer in Lockport, arrived in Canada when he was five. And after moving to Montreal, he and his newly separated mother Eva came back to Manitoba, to Winnipeg’s north end, when he was 12.

“The north end was a hotbed of Ukrainian things, all my neighbours were Ukrainian. My friends, if they weren’t Ukrainian, they were Yugoslavian or Polish or Jewish.

“It was interesting in a lot of ways. There was a lot of stimulation there.”

There was also the inevitable pains of assimilation between first- and second-generation immigrants.

“I played hooky from Ukrainian school and played hockey and football, and there was always an argument,” Paskievich says. “I remember one incident where, just before a track meet, I couldn’t find my spikes and my shorts, because my mom hid them. She never wanted me to run under the sun in the hot weather. I might get a stroke,” He says with a smile.

“Who runs over hurdles in the sun? It was not part of her experience.

Another more poignant memory was of the delivery services that used to dot Main Street. They specialized in delivering packages to all the north end’s old countries, including the Ukraine, a region under the boot of the Soviet Union.

“We would send parcels all the time. You would send boxes of socks and babushkas and Aspirins,” he says. In return, his family would receive state-censored letters and photographs of unsmiling, emaciated relatives.

When he was just 22, Paskievich decided to close that gap by travelling to the Ukraine and visiting his relatives in the town of Kamiana Hora (which translates to Stoney Mountain). It was a process that involved a certain amount of intrigue, due to the hardline Communist regime of the early ’70s.

“At that time you weren’t allowed in the rural areas, so I snuck in there for a night,” he says. “And I was kept in the house and I left in the morning under cover of darkness back into the city.”

It was there he heard uncensored accounts of the way of life for Ukrainians under the Soviets, stories told by witnesses in My Mother’s Village — stories of Red Army brutality, of Stalin’s demonic “artificial famine,” stories of starving mothers who ate their dead children.

“When we grew up, we had to remember all that stuff. It was our responsibility to remember and somehow make things better. We had to be, in many ways, some kind of liberation front,” he says. “And if you weren’t interested for one reason or another, you developed a sense of guilt.”

His own experience is reflected and refracted in the documentary’s interviews with Ukrainian-Canadian peers, such as Calgary-raised author George Melnyk, Vancouver-based dancer Lecia Poluan or former Winnipegger Halya Kuchmij, who were, like him, raised “between borders.”

“Every individual is a variation on the same theme — the idea that they’re caught between two worlds,” he says. “And so, I wanted to explore that.”

“I didn’t want to be the spokesperson for our generation,” he says. “And I didn’t know how to interview myself on camera.”

Paskievich now lives in the Wolseley area, although he still returns to the north end to visit his ailing mother, as he is doing this day.

He has a 16-year-old son named Andrew with wife Marilyn MacKinnon. John encourages Andrew to play sports, and cuts him slack, as any Wolseley dad would, when his son dyes his hair yellow.

And he is content that his film addresses and honours his legacy as a Ukrainian-Canadian.

“No one has made a film on this topic, on the psychology of exile, and how it affects you growing up,” he says. “As far as the Ukrainian community is concerned, I wanted to bear witness.”

And Paskievich allows, finally, that maybe the audience for his film is more specific than he would initially admit.

“In a way,” he says, “I was making the film for my son.”