Music can be born anywhere, and a song helps you come to terms with even a less than happy reality. About this, as well as about the changes that took place before the war in Ukraine and about the need for security, the documentary "Heat singers" by Ukrainian director Nadia Parfan (lit. – The Heat Singers), which will be screened on Tuesday, November 22 at 19:30 p.m. will take place due to the wide spectrum of topical events in the well-known Vilnius Kirtimiu cultural center.
In the warm and lifelike film "Heat singers", the sound and songs lead the audience through the lives and daily routines of the employees of the municipal heating company of Western Ukraine with a ridiculously long name - IvanoFrankivskTeploKomunEnergo. Here, music is born from Ukraine's collapsing central heating system as a team of dedicated pipe fitters rush from house to house to tame hot fountains. Rumbling radiators and echoing metal intertwine with workers' songs.
For many years, Ivan Vasyliovyčius was the head of the trade union of the IvanoFrankivskTeploKomunEnergo municipal heating company of Western Ukraine. His magnum opus is a union chorus of mechanics, repairmen, dispatchers, accountants and other workers. The folk and patriotic songs they perform in rehearsals become a bridge between the past communist era and the new political and economic reality.
The film "Heat Singers" is a story about the central heating system as a symbol of modern Ukraine. It examines how outdated social structures do not fit into the modern economy but, paradoxically, continue to function. Traces of working-class culture and human warmth serve as a survival mechanism in times of great change.
Director Nadia Parfan has been watching the choir of heating company workers since childhood
Film director Nadia Parfan studied cultural studies and social anthropology, received a Gaude Polonia scholarship and completed documentary film directing courses at the Andrzej Wajda Film School in Warsaw. Since 2014 Nadia creates films as a writer and director. Her debut with the film "Heat singers" took place at the "Visions du Reel" international competition, and was rated as the best documentary film by the Ukrainian Film Academy and the Ukrainian Film Critics Association.
Nadia Parfan's grandfather founded and managed the first central heating company in Ivano-Frankivsk, western Ukraine, in the 1960s. Her mother has been working there since Parfan was born and attends the company choir's recital every week. One day, Nadia Parfan decided to join her mother by carrying a camera.
"When I came to the recital, I expected to see sly civil servants deceiving their bosses - pretending to sing in a choir to avoid having to work. But what I saw there really surprised me. The recitals take place in a hall next to a huge workshop with spinning machines and pipes. I could clearly hear the joy of the choristers being together - one of the rarest and most beautiful things that can happen to a group of people in our lonely XNUMXst century," shares the director, remembering how the idea of the film was born.
Nadia Parfan's previous film was about two young Ukrainians who fled to the West hoping to become rock stars. Their music eventually took them where no one would expect to find something musical. “In a way, Heat singers is a further step in my personal journey of exploring the most magical things in life: beauty is inevitable; music knows no bounds; creativity is an essential human need - along with food, sleep and warmth," says N. Parfan.
Municipal services in Ukrainian cities changed rapidly before the war, as did many things in the country after the Maidan revolutions of 1991, 2004 and 2014. While the old system was being dismantled, there was still a lack of clear visions of an alternative. The film Heat singers is particularly relevant in today's context as it portrays a return to the basic need to be warm and safe here and now, and even more so in the future.
Event free, but those who come to the screening are invited to make a voluntary donation to funds and initiatives that help Ukrainian freedom fighters.
