The film about Mykolaiv winemakers «Wounded Earth» won the main prize of the jury at the festival in Spain

The Ukrainian documentary film Wounded Land about Mykolaiv winemakers won the main prize of the jury of the Wine International Film Festival / Most Festival in Spain.

These are the products of three countries: the USA, Ukraine and Poland, the Mykolaiv Crisis Media Center reports.

«The film tells about people who did not leave their land, despite the constant danger, continue to take care of it, nurture their vines, some of the heroes of the film went to fight, almost all of them volunteer, but everyone knows for sure what they are protecting: the value of human life, private property, family traditions,» the media center notes.

Heorhii Molchanov, one of the heroes of the film and co-owner of the Slivino Village winery near Mykolaiv, notes that it is important for a winemaker to talk about the war even today, because the front has moved a little away from Mykolaiv, so people, according to him, are relaxing. That is why «it is necessary to constantly remind that the war is going on, to inform and help».

«Our winery was bombarded with jet artillery, tornadoes, shells got stuck in the vineyards. There was help from the Rotary Foundation to the sappers of the State Emergency Service, thanks to which we were quickly demined. There is also the Californian fund Routers of peace, which is engaged in demining orchards and vineyards. They clear the mines themselves and provide funds for planting material. Next, we want to work with this fund in the Mykolaiv and Kherson regions, demining plots of gardens and vineyards and planting new ones,» said Georgy Molchanov.

In addition to Slivino Village, representatives of the Olbio Nuvo winery, also in the Mykolaiv region, became the heroes of the film.

The director and co-producer of the film, Roman Zaiats, the founder of the «Heart» project, said before the premiere of the film in Kyiv that this is a kind of road movie, shot in April 2022. But the idea of a documentary about the wine regions of Ukraine began to be realized even before the large-scale war.

«The final incentive to shoot a new documentary was the shelling of vineyards in the Mykolaiv region, where the Russian invaders covered the vineyard of the private farm SliVino Village with rockets like rain, and the cynical destruction of a large warehouse of Wine Bureau wines. Later, the story about the broken WineIdea winery and the story of the Olbio Nuvo winery in the south of Ukraine were added, where winemaker Pavlo Mahalias is at war and making wine at the same time, and in addition, the winery has an antique museum and a museum with Russian missiles, which he collects in his vineyards. These are far from all the heroes of the film, but certainly all of them work on Ukrainian land and, in fact, all of them use the potential of Ukrainian land, and winemaking here has a certain symbolism...», he noted.

Earlier it was reported that the Mykolayiv region was visited by the film crew of the film «Divia», which is being worked on by Ukrainian documentarians. The goal is to record and disseminate information about the impact of military operations on nature and the consequences of this impact on society. Documentaries showed footage from the filming.