Film screening “Yona. Hungry Delirium” and a public discussion about the famine of 1946-1947 took place

On January 16, 2025, the Holodomor Museum hosted a screening of the documentary film “Yona. Hungry Delirium” and a public talk focusing on the mass man-made famine of 1946–1947.

Before the screening, Anastasia Hudyma, Director of the Department for Diversity, Inclusion and Equal Opportunities of the Public Broadcasting Company, and director Olena Kryvenko presented the film.

“Today, we are going to watch a film and talk about a topic that is one of the least studied in Ukrainian history – the famine of 1946-1947. In particular, we will look at the ethnic cross-section of this tragedy, because it affected almost all national minorities that used to live in Ukraine at that time – Bulgarians, Poles, Germans, etc.,” Lesia Hasydzhak, head of the Holodomor Museum, emphasised before the start of the film. She thanked the film creators – the main character, Ukrainian artist of Bulgarian origin Yona Tukuser, and the Public Broadcasting Company for their crucial work because “you can write many scientific papers, but cinema is the means that knows no borders and is accessible and understandable not only in Ukraine but also throughout the world.”

The President of the Association of Bulgarians of Ukraine, Anton Kisse, called the film one of the significant steps towards scaling up and thorough research into the tragedy, which actually affected every Bulgarian family in southern Ukraine during that time.

After watching the film, the main character, Yona Tukuser, talked about how she became immersed in the topic of tragic pages of history and how she documented the eyewitnesses’ memories and reproduced them in her paintings. During the event, she donated the archive of testimonies collected over this time – almost 80 interviews with witnesses of the famine of 1946–1947 – to the Holodomor Museum fund. The artist considers a particularly valuable find to be her meeting with one of the “istrebki,” a man who was on the other side of the tragedy. That is, he participated in the seizure of grain and food from fellow villagers, and when the famine began, he was involved in burying the dead. His wife kept records of the deceased during that time, and those lists have survived! During the event, a family descendant handed over records with the names of 702 famine victims in the village of Holytsia, Bolhrad district, Odesa region, to our Museum.

Viktor Krupyna, a senior researcher at the Department of the History of Ukraine in the Second Half of the 20th Century at the Institute of History of Ukraine of the NAS of Ukraine, told those present about the prerequisites, causes, and consequences of the famine of 1946-1947. And our colleague, head of the Holodomor Oral History Department, Yuliia Kotsur, shared the Museum’s experience in collecting testimonies about the Holodomor and the mass man-made famine of 1946–1947. Additionally, she presented to the public the Questionnaire on the Mass Man-Made Famine of 1946–1947 and methodological recommendations for its use, developed by the Holodomor Oral History Department of our Museum.