The video is dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the Babyn Yar tragedy outside Kyiv.
The video with music by Svyatoslav Lunev won Ukraine’s first Cannes Lions award. The composer created music to commemorate the victims of one of the greatest tragedies of the Jewish people – the Babyn Yar massacre. The video is titled Witness. The performance symbolises the wind that witnessed the atrocious events, and music reminds us of voices of innocent victims.
The video was shot in a park near Babyn Yar last September as part of the memorial concert organised by the Ukrainian government and Ukrainian Jewish Encounter organisation. Vocal parts were performed by talented children Oleksandr Podolyan and Anastasia Bahinska. The vocals were accompanied by violins to express the sorrow for the massacre victims. The lyrics were written by poet Yuriy Sak. The project was conceived and directed by Gennadiy Kurochka, exclusive representative of CNN in Ukraine.
In addition to the vocal part, the performance Witness features an art installation in the form of a shofar – an ancient Jewish music instrument made of ram’s horn. “Its shape resembles the queue of the people at their last moment of life at the edge of the Babyn Yar,” authors write on the project’s website. The Jews believe that the shofar’s sound is a harbinger of the year of sorrow, but it also gives a hope that every death is followed by a new life. According to the author, the wind, the only witness of those events, blows through the instrument producing the sound that goes through generations and accompanies the singing of the children who remember the tragedy.
More than 34,000 Kyiv Jews were killed in Babyn Yar in two days in 1941. In the following two years, Nazi occupants used the site to kill and bury people who were classified as enemies of the Third Reich, among them Ukrainians, Roma, Soviet war prisoners and others.
Photo: Gennadiy Kurochka
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