Logbook Day 2 – Ukrainian Group

We all came into day two with renewed energy and motivation for the tasks that we knew lay ahead of us. Chris Groenveld provided a humorous start with a comical short film about an Indian family’s pet rooster. Her examples of short documentaries provided a springboard to discuss how we might go about creating our own documentaries, with useful advice on structuring narrative, technicalities of film-making and asking our subjects relevant questions. We left feeling more confident that we could in fact produce an interesting short film with no previous experience. Our second activity of the morning was focused on the Roma communities of Europe, their languages, and cultural outputs such as art and literature. Each group selected one piece of the Roma’s unique literature to relay through collage, then set about collecting colourful newspaper clippings. We were especially lucky to have artist Robert Czibi guiding us and demonstrating his impressive creations in the medium of collage. After lunch we reunited with our lovely Ukrainian teacher, Marta, where we tested our grasp of the Ukrainian alphabet with more success than yesterday. We were introduced to the case system and tangled our tongues with some tongue twisters. To round off the day, the Ukrainian group collaborated over the completion of the Roma collage – working with the inspiration of the poem “Szo-j po cseri?” (What’s in the sky?). This poem ignited a vivid interpretation of the ways in which you can have so many beautiful things yet, at the heart of life, nothing at all. At the end of the day, we were happy to be reunited with the friends we made yesterday and to start making progress on our projects.