“Even with threats.” Yevgeny Nyschuk announced the pressure on the Shevchenko Committee – News

A frame from the movie “Taras. The Return”

Chairman of the Taras Shevchenko National Award Committee Evgeny Nyshchuk announced the pressure on him from the team of one of the nominees for the award, which did not make it to the next round of selection.

As Nyshchuk admitted on the air of the program “Culture in time”, we are talking about the authors of the tape “Taras. Return”.

This film was nominated in the category “Cinema” and was eliminated from the list of contenders before the second round of the award. Then there were two films left in this category: “Pamfir” by Dmytro Suholytky-Sobchuk and “Yuki” by Volodymyr Mula.

At the beginning of February, the committee announced that it had decided on the laureates of the Shevchenko Prize for 2024. At the same time, he emphasized that there will be no winner in the “Cinema” category this year.

Now Nyschuk confirmed that the committee from the nominees who did not pass the selection, “aggressive hate began, including even threats“. In addition, according to him, the same attitude was experienced by competitors who continued the struggle.

The head of the Shevchenko Committee emphasized that he respects the director of the film “Taras. Return” Oleksandr Denysenko and supported this film, but could not pressure his colleagues on the committee to make them vote differently. “This is the position of the committee, 19 people“, Nyschuk noted.

On February 16, a statement appeared on the website of the National Union of Cinematographers regarding the absence of the Shevchenkovka laureate in the field of cinematography. The film community expressed concern that a disagreement with the selection process of one of the nominees actually deprived one of the winners of the award.

“It so happened that after one of the competitors of “Pamfir” did not go beyond the first premium round (we will say right away: this decision of the Shevchenko Committee seems to us to be erroneous), supporters of the film, which had to withdraw from the competition, and its author deployed, so to speak, a rather powerful propaganda campaign aimed at discrediting the film “Pamfir” and its director…

One should not doubt the sincerity of the defenders of the film “Taras. The Return”, but this sincerity was transformed, in relation to “Pamfir”, into a vulgar method of spitting and discrediting the work of art, which was interpreted and primitivized in the worst traditions of the recent past“, the authors of the statement noted.

About the Shevchenko Prize

Shevchenko Prize – the highest creative state award for significant contribution to the development of culture and art in Ukraine. It has been awarded since 1961 until Taras Shevchenko’s birthday, which is celebrated on March 9.

Last year, the presentation of the Shevchenko Prize was accompanied by a big scandal – the path from the announcement of the laureates by the committee to the presidential signature under the document on their award took four long months – for the first time in the history of independent Ukraine, the prize was not awarded until the poet’s birthday.