Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund for the Arts at the Albuquerque Community Foundation and the New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund at the Albuquerque Community Foundation …New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts.

and Viewers Like You.

THIS TIME, ON COLORES!

JOURNALIST AND FILMMAKER PATRICK HILSMAN SHARES HIS RECENT EXPERIENCES IN CITIES AND ON THE FRONT LINES OF THE WAR IN UKRAINE.

THE CONVERSATION IS FOLLOWED BY THE PREMIERE OF HIS DOCUMENTARY "COMEDY AT WAR."

SHOT ON LOCATION, "COMEDY AT WAR" FEATURES VALARIA WHO FLED THE DESTRUCTION OF HER HOME IN KHARKIV AND IN A TIME OF TRAGEDY TURNED TO COMEDY.

IT'S ALL AHEAD ON COLORES!

[Cars Honking] So you see the smoke rising in the distance.

We just saw amassive explosion go down that way.

Arabic: Where is it?

You see the fire up there.

This was hit less than a minute ago, probably.

No, no, no.

Wait, wait.

Stay in the car.

Stay in the car.

Stay in the car Arabic: Approach.

Approach.

Approach.

French: Ouvert la porte!

[Open the door] Arabic: Move.

Move.

Move.

(Then says field hospital names) >>Lou DiVizio: Joining me today in studio is Patrick Hilsman.

He's an independent filmmaker and journalist who spent the last several months in Ukraine.

Thanks for speaking with us today, Patrick.

First, why Ukraine?

I know you've worked in areas of conflict before as a frontline journalist.

What about this situation pushed you to go and document what was happening there?

>>Patrick Hilsman: I felt something of an obligation because I had been covering a lot of wars that Russia specifically has been involved in.

And I've written a lot of open source investigative pieces about Russian weaponry and the fact that there was a large war that was involving some of the topics that I'd previously covered.

And also, one of my best friends is a Lebanese Ukrainian who I met about a decade ago back when I was covering Syria.

And as the invasion kicked off, he was just chronicling the story of his village, which was being surrounded by Russian forces.

Thankfully, they never made it in, but they were approximately two kilometers from his house, and the Russian and Ukrainian soldiers were actually firing at each other over his home.

And he suggested that I come visit him and do some journalism.

And I stayed in Lviv, which is to the west, and also traveled across the country to Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Kramatorsk, which is in Donbas, Ternopil... >>Lou: How did Ukraine, compared to being the other wartime scenarios that you've been in, that you mentioned Syria?

>>Patrick: The major difference was that in Syria, one side had absolute overwhelming firepower and the other side essentially had almost no firepower.

The fact that the Ukrainians have stuff like early warning systems, advanced satellite technology that the Americans have provided them has made a huge difference.

Just having a warning of a few minutes is the difference between soldiers getting blown up in an airstrike and being able to take shelter and surviving.

I witnessed things like that, where the technological edge that the Ukrainian forces have in some circumstances saved lives.

And that's a that's a massive difference.

Whereas in Syria,the regime forces would simply encircle cities and just blow them to smithereens.

They've flattened cities as well in Ukraine.

But the difference is that it's come at a terrible cost for them to do that.

Whereas in Syria, they were able to do it with relatively few casualties and thus no consequences.

>>Lou: Your piece Comedy at War, that you shared with us featuring Valeria.

What made you want to follow a comedian of all people in a wartime scenario?

>>Patrick: So she's from Kharkiv and then she ended up having to flee west with her daughter.

And currently she's living in Ternopil Oblast, which is not far from Lviv.

It's in well, it's a couple of hundred kilometers, but in Ukraine standards.

That's right next door.

And it's in western Ukraine.

And she's living with a family friend who she never met before the war.

So, it was almost a complete stranger.

But this person was warm and welcoming and allowed her and her daughter to live with her.

And they're like family now.

They cooked for us.

They were laughing, having a good time.

I'm vegan, and they considered it a fun challenge because they don't really experience a lot of vegans out there.

And they were had such a fun time trying to come up with, like, a recipe that I could eat.

And it was just fun to see them interact and just be like a happy family of people that had never met before the war.

So, we went on a road trip with her from Lviv, where she was performing to Ternopil where she was staying.

And we got a chance to see sort of like a new Ukrainian family that was created by the conflict.

Part of the concept of it is it's almost like the opposite of a Seinfeld episode, because the Seinfeld episode, the premise is it's talking about all the funny things that happened to inform a comedian's comedy.

And it features Seinfeld doing stand-up.

And for us, this ended up being all the depressing things that lead somebody to do comedy.

But her act is very much a wartime act.

She made a joke about how one of her close F=friends had a bomb landed in his yard and it blew a gigantic hole.

And he said, well, you know, I've always wanted a swimming pool and that kind of thing does.

It keeps people fighting and it keeps people it keeps people's spirits high.

And that truly matters.

And in a war, the kind of gallows humor that people have really says a lot about the conditions that they're in and what they need to get through the day.

And what I felt was compelling about her was that she was an internally displaced person from the city of Kharkiv, which is a majority Russian speaking city in eastern Ukraine, which has been viciously targeted by the Russian forces, which is in itself quite ironic because a large number of the victims of Putin's aggression have been the Russian speakers of Ukraine.

And this runs counter to the propaganda that they've put out saying that they're liberating the Russian speaking population.

Of course, the president is Russian speaking.

The experience that she described to us is absolutely harrowing because part of what makes it so stressful for people to leave home is that as they left, they didn't even know where they would end up because the trains had to take the safest route to the west.

So sometimes that would mean that they would end up in Ternopil or they'd end up in Lvivor elsewhere.

And to just to have a country which in many ways looks like my country you go into, they don't have Starbucks, but you go you can go into a coffeehouse, which is the equivalent of Starbucks.

They have contactless payment.

Everything appears as it would in America in a lot of ways.

But then a few kilometers away, there is the second largest army in the world invading and to.

It was interesting to learn how people are really stubbornly insisting on clinging to daily life.

And in Kharkiv, for example, there is constant shelling.

There have been a horrible number of civilian casualties.

Yet the subway still runs.

And having the subway operational, despite shelling, despite bombing, despite Russian forces literally trying to encircle the city at a certain point, is very, it's inspiring.

And it shows a certain amount of stubbornness to insist on continuing daily life.

And I think that she going on stage making jokes about the war, which has robbed her of her home and of her career for the time being, was definitely something that we can all learn from.

>>Lou: Sure.

You mentioned that stubbornness and we've heard examples of that from other people that we've talked to from Ukraine who are here in New Mexico and just watching news stories.

But how much do you think that that plays into the relative success that Ukraine has had holding off the Russians?

>>Patrick: I think that people might put a little bit too much emphasis on there being some kind of unique character trait to people that live there because they're not terribly different from anyone else in how they view life.

People want their kids to go to school.

People want to be able to enjoy their life and laugh and be happy.

And people are still getting married.

But it's part of the reason that they've been so successful in fighting back is simply that they just don't want to die.

They've seen what's happened in cities like Mariupol, and it's an apocalypse.

So, the idea of banding together to try to resist that is not it doesn't necessarily take a unique outlook or a unique stubbornness to be willing to resist.

It's just people's insistence on living is really what their secret weapon is, I think.

>>Lou: Now you're back here in New Mexico where your parents live.

And coming back, what do you want people to know here in the U.S. but here in New Mexico also about what's happening in Ukraine?

>>Patrick: I want people to know that the propaganda that's being put forward about it being some kind of country that's oppressive to Russian speakers is laughable.

President is a Russian speaker.

The cities that are suffering the most from Russian bombardment are majority Russian speaking.

A lot of the times, if you go out on the front lines, the soldiers will be speaking in Russian and it's in some parts of the country.

It's unusual to hear Ukrainian spoken, and that is the pillar of Putin's propaganda, is the notion that he's liberating the Russian speaking population of Ukraine and that that's it's just false because the Russian speaking cities have been just viciously targeted.

And I think that it's important for people to understand that that is not true.

That is not a truthful message that's coming from Russia.

Secondly, Ukraine needs aid, period.

Is a huge lack of some basic supplies.

Fuel is almost impossible to come by.

It's rationed and for people to be able to live normally, they need vehicles because Ukraine is a gigantic country.

So traveling between cities now that air travel is grounded, is incredibly difficult.

It can you know, you can be in a car for 24 hours sometimes.

And you just have to get used to living in cars in order to travel anywhere.

And things like solar energy, hybrid vehicles, cars with better gas mileage, basic medical equipment, things that people are not thinking of very much in the media or in public consciousness are needed out there.

For example, there's a lot of volunteers that are going over there to fight.

Right.

There's a large, Ukraine has a large army and it has a lot of manpower.

What would probably be more helpful for them would be experienced drivers or medics or people that are good at operating drones, people that are good at repairing vehicles, people that are good at software.

There's a need for everything now.

And we just look at the military side.

But Ukraine's success so far has as much to do with them insisting on keeping civil society active as it does on the military aspect.

Actually, one of the one of the first things I said when I got there was that I said, you know, I think Ukraine might actually be successful in this war.

And my friend said, Why?

I said, because I just paid for a soda at a gas station with a credit card.

That still works.

A lot of the areas around Kiev that were devastated by the Russian bombardment.

You can go there now and they're repairing them.

I was headed east once and I remember we had to there was a destroyed bridge and we had to sort of drive down by the river bed to a little like a smaller bridge that had been built to try and to compensate for the fact that the bridge was blown up.

And then a couple weeks later, when we came back, there was a new bridge there.

And I said, this was this was blown up last time we were here right?

And it was repaired.

So, you see people fixing things under bombardment.

That's extraordinary.

And if you want to talk about what is contributing to them, being able to at least fight for their independence, I think it has a lot to do with that.

It's not just soldiers, it's everybody.

>>Lou: Another key player in the mentality of people in Ukraine is obviously their president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

Describe how he's helped the people of Ukraine push through this.

>>Patrick: People understand that he's not a Ukrainian ethno nationalist.

He's not going to say that the only true Ukrainians are those that don't speak Russian because he's a Russian speaker himself.

And that, I think, has had a role in unifying the nation because the Russian peaking cities in the east have been fiercely resisting and they're bearing the brunt of it.

When you go on the front lines, you hear a lot of Russian and on the streets you hear a lot of Russian and Zelensky as a leader who's not known as a military leader, who's known as a comedian, really does kind of stick it to the occupier in that sense, because Putin is a former KGB agent, then he was an FSB.

I think he was the director of the FSB and to have him be militarily impotent against a country that's led by a democratically elected comedian.

It does sort of personify the fact that democracy is better than dictatorship.

>>Valeria: I realized that I am half Hitler.

[Laughs] COMEDY AT WAR >>Announcer: Okay, next comic up is Valeria.

[CHEERS, CLAPPING] >>Valeria Mykhailova: Well, I hope you're ready, because I know only two languages, the native and the swear words.

So, if I were you, I would, I would support the people who are on the stage today, because among them right now.

Maybe they are our future president.

[LAUGHTER] My name is Valeria Mykhailova.

I am from Kharkiv and I am a half of stand up comedian because it's not my job, it's like a hobby.

I was making some jokes when I was a little girl, but at the university I wanted to go into [inaudible], but they didn't take me.

And then I've found an open microphone and went to standup.

I've started in 2015, but I have some breaks when was born my child.

War is not funny at all, but there is a lot of things we should turn into comedy.

Just for me, it's kind of therapy, because I have a lot of emotions that accumulate inside.

And there is one of ways to get them out.

After Lavrov speech, I've realized that I'm half Hitler.

[laughter, clapping] It's not a joke, my father is Jewish.

After the full scale invasion, I've needed to go away from my home because Kharkiv is bombed and shelled a lot.

They were aircrafts into my town and a lot of that tanks.

My daughter was afraid a lot, and we decided to go somewhere.

Where its calm.

[ROAD NOISE] I don't want to leave Ukraine, I want to stay here.

I love my country and I want to live here.

Don't know if I want to live in Kharkiv.

Because it's too scary to live near, near the... And now the house I lived before when I spent my childhood.

There is no more, it was destroyed in the beginning of March.

Now I'm living in Berezhany.

It's near Ternopli in 50 kilometers from Ternopli.

And I'm living with my friends mother.

We never met before the war.

We haven't seen each other.

But she's a great woman because now we're living like a family.

We're doing everything together.

Kharkiv is a big city so there was a lot of people in all immigration trains.

People were waiting for a couple of days to leave.

They were living and sleeping at the railway station and in the metro near there.

And so we can't move for two weeks.

I couldn't sleep at the railway station with my daughter because it was too cold.

She's old enough to understand everything that's going on.

I don't lie to her about everything that's happening.

So she understood that we're under shelling, and that there are bombs falling into us and when I said her that we need to move into a more peaceful and calmer place, And she has no questions.

She's missing our home, our kittens and everything.

But she understands that we can't come back.

For now.

I've got a lucky ticket again because the godfather of my daughter, he drived us into Alexandria.

And from there we were waiting for 5 or 6 hours at the railway station and then came immigration train.

And when you are sitting in the immigration train, you don't know exactly where we are going.

they understand, you know, that each immigration train to the west of the country, the stations were changing and our route was changing.

Because when we went through Vinnytsia, it was bombed.

When you go out, your route is changing a lot and even the train driver doesn't know how we will arrive.

Oh!

Horses!

How can we live now?

Welcome.

I like coming here because it brings me a lot of energy from the people that are sitting in the hall, listen and laugh and clap and all that stuff and it's like therapy because a lot of emotions are accumulating inside and it's one of the ways to bring them out.

And for now, people need comedy and I need to get outside my emotions.

Before I go into stage, I'm nervous and it's a lot of adrenaline inside me.

And when I go into the stage and when I am on the stage right now, I feel like whew.

By the way, do you know that the Cult Comedy Hall is an official bomb shelter.

So next time you could not buy tickets, just wait for the siren.

Because of the war a lot of my jokes was about my divorce, about relationships, men and women, about my daughter, about work, and how devastating that was on me.

And now a lot of jokes about the invasion because it's that thing that worry me a lot.

One of my friend was in the army and uh, and now I've started this, she was in Mariupol.

And when we get here I tried to connect, to connect with her and her friend send me a message and she is not alive for six days.

And I don't know where she is burried.

Don't know how she died.

What has happened.

I don't think do I want to know everything that happened.

And I hope that we will win because if Ukraine wouldn't win, I assume that Russians wouldn't stop with Ukraine and it's very important to us, we are well grateful for all the countries that are helping us.

But we need sanctions, we need weapons, it's... we depend on it and it's a question of our lives and survival because the only thing that I know that if Ukraine would fall the Russians wouldn't stop.

After the full-scale invasion, I am not planning more than a day.

All my plans end tomorrow.

I don't have a long, long term plans for now.

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"UNTIL NEXT WEEK, THANK YOU FOR WATCHING."

Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund for the Arts at the Albuquerque Community Foundation and the New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund at the Albuquerque Community Foundation …New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts.

and Viewers Like You.