Rivne, Ukraine I

If you're new to the blog, we're currently writing about our time Ukraine-- our first visit back to our home country since we left ~20 years ago.

From Novovolynsk (Yuriy's birthplace), we took a marshrutka to Rivne, my birthplace. Turns out Yuriy and I were born in Ukrainian towns about 100 miles apart (never knew they were so close). We immigrated 6000 miles from Ukraine to the United States with our families. Yet we still somehow landed close to one another! I grew up in Idaho, Yuriy grew up in Washington, 500 miles apart. And a few years ago, we crossed paths, fell in love, got married. Now we live 0 miles apart, and that's just the way I like it.

Yuriy and I stayed in Rivne at my dad's cousin, Luda's, house. She summoned her niece & nephew (around our age) to give us a tour on our first day. The four of us piled into a car and drove around town. They took us to churches, cemeteries, the main train station, a frozen lake dotted with fishermen, shopping centers in town, the brand new mall, their flower shop business (which they were very proud of), and finally dropped us off for a few hours to explore on our own. They were so hesitant to leave us, as if we'd get lost or stolen. We tried to remind them we had been in several countries already without knowing the language, and managed to get around... at least we could speak Ukrainian here.

I moved to the United States with my family in 1989 when I was just one year old. Thus I don't remember a thing about the city I was born in. I had such a wild mix of emotions to see the town that my parents lived in and started their family together (they grew up in smaller nearby villages). I couldn't tell if I was happy or sad. I was happy to see where my mom and dad originated from. I was happy to see the place that formed their lives, thoughts, style, and culture. I was happy and sentimental imagining my mom and dad walking these streets and shopping these stores in their younger years. It was nice to see people around who looked like them and spoke like them. However, at the same time I felt sad to see poverty and a country still recovering from it's Communist past and trying to grow into an independent country (since 1991). It felt like the modern world was just trickling into this place and they were trying to catch up. I tried to imagine what my parents' life would have been like if they hadn't moved to the US 21 years ago with their small kids in tow. I tried to imagine what my story would have been like growing up in Rivne and whether I'd have similar interests and aspirations. I got a glimpse of what our lives would have looked like when we visited my mom's brother and sister and their families in a village just outside of Rivne. But more on that later.

I never missed my parents so much as I did while we were in Rivne. I would have done anything to have them there with me as my tour guides, reliving their past and explaining everything I saw. Instead, it was Yuriy and I trying to figure out the country we were born in, but know little about.

Has anyone else had a similar experience? How did you feel visiting your birthplace for the first time?

Here's a small look at the place where I spent the first year of my life in a stroller.

- Julia

The main movie theater. And Taras Shevchenko standing in front.

The giant Christmas tree is going up in the center of town.

Our hard to miss tour guide (my dad's cousin's niece... I think).

I love Ukrainian Christmas decorations! Very old fashioned.

The central train station (we came here to buy tickets to Kiev).

The place was packed with waiting people, stray dogs keeping warm, and the occasional bird from outside.

Hot piroshki, drinks, and other snacks selling outside the train station.

Inside Luda's house (my dad's cousin)-- where Yuriy and I stayed the night. Her decor is so charming and so Ukrainian.

Luda's kids on their wedding days. 

"God is love"

"...go and sin no more"

Back to business

Finally getting back to business as I took a few days off again to go to the Mojave desert30 miles south of Baker CA. It's a pretty isolated area with the son of one of my oldest friends. He shot video and I shot with my little point/shoot camera.

Today it's back to getting money for Ghostkeeper with no friends, relatives or anyone coming to stay at my place. Having an excuse to not work is legendary among writers, at least many of the ones I know, especially me. 

I am continuing to pass out my proposal and script and hope to find some sales agents that might consider Ghostkeeper 2 in terms of some advance foreign sales that could help financing in Canada and lastly, the U.S.

Naturally I'd love for a distributor to simply write me a check, but that's also got it's attachments. With a single funder supplying the whole $2 million, you can bet they're gonna want their say in every aspect from script to casting to locations and even down to the muffins. 

The best scenario, at least for me, is to get several funders to play off each other,  allowing me to make the movie I wrote with fewer conflicts and confrontations. Add to that a funder who trusts me, and people like that do exist.

It's just a matter of finding them.

(Mon: The plan)

Haute Meeting with Mac Cosmetics' Mary Beth Donohue

Spending an afternoon with fellow beauty enthusiasts is as much fun as one could hope for in a single day. I was one of a handful of beauty writers, influencers and trend-setters who turned out at the Renaissance Hotel in Midtown Atlanta to meet Mac Cosmetics’ Assistant Manager of Global Communications Mary Beth Donohue during her visit last weekend.

Tammie Reed of Talking with Tammie played host for our meet-up and connected us all. During our conversations, Mary Beth shared tips on blogging about Mac Cosmetics as well as insider-secrets about what’s Haute for fall 2011.

Like most girls, I use a variety of beauty products, but one that I cannot live without is my Mac NC-45 concealer! I use it every day and my skin looks “cute-ifyingly” flawless as a result.

So what’s your fave Mac Cosmetics beauty essential?

Where We're At Now

We are currently hanging out in beautiful Whistler in BC Canada. Enjoying the 2nd snowiest season on record, beautiful spring weather and the amazing atmosphere of the TELUS World Ski & Snowboard Festival. 

How to break into the business

Last week a director friend of mine and I exchanged stories of how we ended up in the film industry. It's a question I often get, "how did you break in". And as with all answers; it's a little bit of luck, a lot of motivation and more determination.

And even that doesn't help most of the time.

My friend Paul Lynch broke into directing after he quit school in Grade 9 after he failed French. He began drawing cartoons which led to a few jobs in Toronto and finally a magazine. Then he made a short film that led to a job at the CBC, the Canadian national network. And that led to a feature and he was off.

The big thing here was that it was in the late 60's and jobs were available. In fact the CBC advertised for 3 people to become directors. Only Paul and another guy applies. Imagine doing that now? You'd have a thousand at the door.

For me, it was a little different. I loved TV and movies, watched them as much as my parents would let me. I graduated high school and went to college in Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit. In my second year, I was looking for a summer job and at the government job listings, a clerk offered me several jobs. One of them was for a mailroom person at the local TV station.

At that moment, I could have gone a few ways; the job was permanent, which meant I would be lying when they asked me if I was indeed going to stay there forever. Yet there was something about that job. It was show business, okay, delivering mail, but the closest I had been to show business since I interviewed a Disc Jockey at the same station.

I decided to try the job out. I lied and said I would stay and I got the job. Monday morning I arrived at 8am and walked into the studio. The cameras were silent, nobody was there and I was alone.  It took all of five minutes.

I was never going to leave. Ever.

I stayed there for 4 years, moving to film editing, to radio, and finally to the newsfilm department where I learned how to shoot 16mm film. I even got married.

Then a newscamera job came up in Toronto, the big time in Canada. I worked in Detroit in news and thought it would be nice to work in Toronto, neat, clean, safe Canada. I lasted 4 months. They fired me.

So I had a choice, go back to Windsor/Detroit, or go to Vancouver where a friend I met at a film course, had always encouraged me to go west. My marriage eventually broke up and I made a few shorts in Vancouver, got a job writing, producing and directing corporate films in Saskatchewan and commercials in Calgary.

I made friends in Calgary with a fast-talking producer and when both of us decided to leave to make movies, it wasn't a suprise to anyone. It took a year for us to raise the $650,000 for Ghostkeeper, a supernatural thriller, it was the first local feature made in Calgary by Calgary people.

After that I never got a real another real film gig for 9 years.

So much for success. Why not? Well, I was in Calgary which in the mid 80's was hardly a movie town. A few American movies filmed there, and there were no tax incentives and very few features were made locally again.

I ended up in Toronto, a city I never liked and apparently it didn't like me. But the one thing I always did was write. I wrote a half dozen screenplays in that time and directed two of them on ridiculous budgets of around $40,000 each. Ideas were great but execution was pretty bad.

Then I got another break. A green card. America.

It came in a lottery that the US holds every year for certain countries. You wrote a letter saying you wanted to go to America and you waited. Thousands applied. Some wrote dozens of letters, some wrote hundreds.  I wrote one.

And I got it.

Paul, my director friend also got me an agent in LA. So in February 1990, I arrived, excited, ready to go. My agent got me a handful of meetings -- over a period of 2 years. So much for the magic of having an agent.

I left him for another, who was pretty good and during that time I got a job on a series. Back in Canada. Go figure.

That series led to another and another in Canada and it was obviously ironic that the country that never hired me before now wanted me because I lived in LA. It led to some TV  movies and I had a good run of around 12 years, even doing American films although I was mostly hired because I was Canadian and being that qualified for the ever-precious "Canadian Content".

And now, after 30 years,I'm working on making another film in Canada. A remake of the first film I ever made. How's that for a circle? Dramatic irony?

No blog today.

Having to run around for a few days. Will be back Monday.

Novovolynsk II

More photos from our time wandering around Novovolynsk. 

This post includes a handful of photos from the local bazaar, where mostly older women sell produce, meat, and smoked fish. Many had random sized bottles that they'd recycled and filled with some white liquid-- either home raised milk or kefir. Some women had a couple of bottles and a small bag of one or two types of vegetables from their garden. They can't possibly make much more than a few dollars from what they've brought to the bazaar, yet they brave the cold for that little bit of income. My toes and fingers hardly lasted walking through the bazaar.... I don't know how these people stand in one spot for several hours a day in the snow! Determination. Or perhaps they have a thicker skin. 

- Julia