ECO-DISASTER IN UKRAINE: The documentary “Return Sasyk to the Sea,” screening at the Princeton Environmental Film Festival on April 10, details the devastation of Soviet irrigation efforts in southern Ukraine. The experiments in the 1970s caused great destruction in the region. (Photo by Andrea Odezynska)
By Anne Levin
Decades before the war currently raging in Ukraine, a fight pitting environmental activists against poachers, bureaucrats, and corrupt officials was raging in southwestern Ukraine. The battle was over an irrigation project that the former Soviet Union began in 1972, to turn all saltwater estuaries into freshwater reservoirs as part of an ongoing effort to beat American agricultural production.
It didn’t work. In fact, the experiment created a slow eco-disaster, according to the documentary Return Sasyk to the Sea, being screened Sunday, April 10 at 3 p.m., live and online, as part of the Princeton Public Library’s Princeton Environmental Film Festival (PEFF). Andrea Odezynska, the filmmaker, is familiar to PEFF audiences from her previous entries in the festival. She lives in Princeton with her family.
Odezynska’s previous films include Felt, Feelings and Dreams; The Whisperer; and Still the River Flows. She made Return Sasyk to the Sea after being awarded a Fulbright scholarship in 2018.
“I was teaching a class on independent American cinema, and you had half the year to do your own research project,” she said. “I knew I wanted to do a film. I was thinking about what part of Ukraine I would like to see, and get to know better. I googled ‘women,’ ‘the environment,’ ‘water,’ and ‘the Black Sea.’ Up came a really interesting article by Dimiter Kenarov, a journalist who works for the Pulitzer Center in Washington, about the estuary.”
Odezynska, who is Ukrainian American, was so moved by the article that she decided to visit the region. She ended up staying a long time. “I talked to anybody who would talk to me and got about 100 hours’ worth of interviews,” she said. “People are so disheartened by what happened to the estuary and the villages around it.”
Not everyone was willing to talk. “People were burned out,” Odezynksa said. “So I had to befriend people, and come back in different seasons. Those changes actually make for more visual interest. I had to dig deeper and stay longer, and I’m happy I did that. I got to know some of the people very well. They are citizens, scientists, and activists.”
The goal of the ill-fated project was to boost agriculture in southwestern Ukraine by rerouting Ukraine’s major rivers and converting all saltwater estuaries into freshwater reservoirs. Sasyk Estuary was the first in line to be converted. “In addition to destroying a pristine ecosystem, residents in the Sasyk Estuary region lost fresh drinking water, watched cancer rates rise, and lost local economies such as fishing,” reads a press release on the film.
Odezynska grew up in Philadelphia. She has family in Ukraine. “They are second cousins. One is a surgeon, one is a retired doctor who just came out of retirement due to the second invasion,” she said.
Her crew thought she was crazy to make a movie about something that happened decades ago. “They asked why I didn’t make a film about Donbas,” she said. “I kept saying that I thought this was really interesting. They were just fascinated about why I would care. To me, it’s kind of a metaphor for the history of Ukraine itself.”
Odezynska was particularly moved by her encounter with a man who lives and grew up in one of the villages at the shores of Sasyk. “He remembered what it was like when he was a little boy,” she said. “They took them on a school bus to see [the project], and told them it was going to be great. They said what you had before, and what you were before, was nothing — before great Soviet thinkers came in and made things better. As a Ukrainian American, it killed me.”
The current war is terrifying for the people Odezynska met. “One of the men who is featured very prominently in the film, an ecologist and author, is taking care the best he can of issues at the estuary and neighboring national park,” she said. “But when the war broke out, he had to take his grandchildren and women in his family to Bulgaria, to safety. I followed his Facebook post.”
Return Sasyk to the Sea has already screened at the Through the Women’s Eyes International Film Festival in Sarasota, Fla., which raised funds to help Ukrainian women refugees and their children. In addition to PEFF, showings include the Yale Environmental Film Festival, the International Wildlife Film Festival, and Paribas Green International Film Festival in Poland. She recently won a 2022 International Wildlife Film Festival Labs Fellowship.
Odezynska will attend the Princeton screening in the library’s Community Room, and appear with Jim Waltman, executive director of The Watershed Institute, at a Q&A session following the film. Visit princetonlibrary.org for information and a link if watching online.
“The film is about this ridiculous kind of plan that is very top-down,” she said. “It was a disaster for the villages and the people in the region, and it didn’t stop there.”