{"id":46151,"date":"2016-05-20T10:31:24","date_gmt":"2016-05-20T17:31:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/?p=46151"},"modified":"2016-11-21T23:37:27","modified_gmt":"2016-11-22T07:37:27","slug":"exclusive-almost-holy-director-steve-hoover-on-his-film-about-a-ukrainian-pastor-who-kidnaps-drug-addicted-youth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2016\/05\/exclusive-almost-holy-director-steve-hoover-on-his-film-about-a-ukrainian-pastor-who-kidnaps-drug-addicted-youth.html","title":{"rendered":"Exclusive: <i>Almost Holy<\/i> director Steve Hoover on his film, about a Ukrainian pastor who &#8220;kidnaps&#8221; drug-addicted youth"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p><a href=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/227\/2016\/05\/almostholy-a.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-46158\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/227\/2016\/05\/almostholy-a.jpg\" alt=\"almostholy-a\" width=\"600\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-46158\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>To some, he\u2019s a lawless vigilante; to others, he\u2019s a hero. Either way, there is something very dramatic about the way <a href=\"http:\/\/mokhnenkoministries.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" class=\" decorated-link\" rel=\"nofollow\">Pastor Gennadiy Mokhnenko<\/a> has dealt with the social crises that have plagued Ukraine since the collapse of the former Soviet Union.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->For over a dozen years now, Mokhnenko has followed a \u201ctough love\u201d program of forcibly abducting homeless, drug-addicted youth and taking them back to his Pilgrim Republic rehabilitation centre, and he has gone to the pharmacies that sell opiates under the counter to these youths and threatened to deal with them even if law enforcement won\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p>Mokhnenko\u2019s story is told in <i><a href=\"http:\/\/www.almostholyfilm.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" class=\" decorated-link\" rel=\"nofollow\">Almost Holy<\/a><\/i>, a documentary by Pittsburgh-based filmmaker Steve Hoover that opens today in New York and Los Angeles. The film \u2014 which counts Terrence Malick among its executive producers \u2014 gets its title from a scene in which Mokhnenko takes a pedophile to the police, and the pedophile complains that the pastor beat him up. \u201cI thought you were holy,\u201d the pedophile says. \u201cAlmost,\u201d Mokhnenko replies.<\/p>\n<p>Hoover \u2014 who previously won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at Sundance for his debut feature <i>Blood Brother<\/i>, which looked at how a friend of his worked with HIV-infected youth in India \u2014 first heard about Mokhnenko when some friends came back from Ukraine with footage of the controversial pastor in 2012, and Hoover immediately agreed to direct a feature-length film about the man.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cGennadiy\u2019s character was the most striking thing to me,\u201d says Hoover. \u201cThere is this immediate draw to it, a pastor kidnapping kids, you know? Just on the surface of it, he\u2019s fascinating. I was just interested in him, in watching him, and what it is that makes him tick.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Hoover says he was also drawn to Mokhnenko\u2019s story because he felt a personal connection to the youth that Mokhnenko works with. \u201cGrowing up, I did a lot of drugs,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve lost a lot of friends to drugs. I never did heroin, but I\u2019ve lost a lot of friends to heroin. It was just one of those things in my adolescence.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBut in terms of the social structure that I was born into, I didn\u2019t end up on the streets or anything. And I didn\u2019t have a bad family, so I couldn\u2019t <i>totally<\/i> relate to these kids, but there is something about it that I connected with. I look at myself when I was that age and I look like these kids and I\u2019m doing everything but the needles, and so that drew me to the kids. But mostly [I was drawn to] this adult figure who came in and did something about it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Hoover went to Ukraine and shot his own footage in 2013 and 2014, and he also made use of footage that Mokhnenko had been keeping in his archives since the turn of the millennium. \u201cHe had somebody spend 20 days digitizing tapes for us, there was that much content,\u201d says Hoover. \u201cAnd a lot of that stuff, he hadn\u2019t seen in years.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Mokhnenko\u2019s methods can be somewhat abrasive. In one scene he berates an ailing addict who was, himself, responsible for spreading drugs to many of the other kids at Pilgrim Republic. Mokhnenko asks the kids to raise their hands if this man ever injected them, and at one point he shouts, \u201cIf I was God, I wouldn\u2019t let him live!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>When Mokhnenko finds a woman who has been kicked out of her home and left to sleep naked in the street, he offers to throw her husband out of the house. And when people point out that he has no authorization for what he\u2019s doing, he replies, \u201cI don\u2019t need permission to do good deeds,\u201d or he says he had to step in because child services wasn\u2019t doing anything for the homeless youth he found.<\/p>\n<p>There is some debate around Mokhnenko\u2019s tactics in Ukraine, and it comes through via clips from Ukrainian talk shows. The film itself, however, doesn\u2019t get into those debates too much; instead, it focuses primarily on following Mokhnenko as he does what he does.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI feel like [the film] looks at what he\u2019s doing, and allows people to process it and make their own judgments,\u201d says Hoover. \u201cI don\u2019t feel comfortable making definitive judgments on his work. I don\u2019t mean to use this as a crutch, but it\u2019s so complicated and each case is so case-specific, that I don\u2019t feel like there\u2019s a blanket statement of right or wrong for what he\u2019s doing.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat\u2019s why I feel like it requires looking more into his conversations with these people, and him trying to figure out what to do or how to help, and how he ultimately chooses to help them. A lot of times, it confounded <i>me<\/i>, because I expected him to do one thing and I found him doing another, and I was expecting him to do that based off of my judgment of who I thought he was, and then he would surprise me.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Interestingly, in a region where most people identify as Eastern Orthodox or Catholic, Mokhnenko comes from the tiny percentage who identify as Protestant \u2014 though Hoover still isn\u2019t sure exactly what subset within that subset Mokhnenko belongs to.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFrom what I\u2019ve looked into, it\u2019s some form of <a href='https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/library\/pentecostal' target='_blank'>Pentecostal<\/a> [church],\u201d he says. \u201cI quickly learned that trying to understand denominations in Ukraine and comparing them to different denominations in the U.S. is not a clear picture. There\u2019s a lot of cultural difference.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>At any rate, Mokhnenko <i>is<\/i> affiliated with some sort of church hierarchy. \u201cHe would joke and he would say, \u2018Don\u2019t show this movie to my bishop,\u2019 if something bad happened,\u201d says Hoover. \u201cAnd this isn\u2019t in the film, but at one point he talked about wearing his pastor\u2019s robe or the outfit because people identify with it. It\u2019s more a formality \u2014 well, it is for most people \u2014 but it\u2019s to not look like such a wild card.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>There does, however, come a point in the film where Mokhnenko thinks about getting rid of his clerical collar.<\/p>\n<p>Unexpectedly, while Hoover was in the country shooting his footage, a <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Euromaidan\" target=\"_blank\" class=\" decorated-link\" rel=\"nofollow\">series of protests<\/a> unfolded, leading to a full-scale revolution that saw the president and many other government officials flee the country in 2014. (The civil unrest \u2014 which pitted pro-European and pro-Russian forces against each other \u2014 was captured in the recent Oscar-nominated documentary <i>Winter on Fire: Ukraine\u2019s Fight for Freedom<\/i>.)<\/p>\n<p>And as these events unfold in Hoover\u2019s film, Mokhnenko floats the possibility that he might have to ask his bishop to relieve him of his pastoral duties \u2014 though so far he hasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOne of his sons did end up joining the army by his own will, and a lot of people have done that,\u201d says Hoover. \u201cBut I think what he was saying there was what he was kind of willing to do. And I think in some ways, from what he shared, he was somewhat controversial in Ukraine as a religious leader because he was taking a non-pacifist stance on this conflict. But his position was, \u2018I\u2019m taking this stance because if people come to my house, I\u2019m not just going to let them kill us, I\u2019m going to do something about it.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n<p>Hoover wasn\u2019t planning on tying Mokhnenko\u2019s story to the wider conflict within the film at first, but eventually he realized he couldn\u2019t avoid it.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt made a lot of sense, of how well that actually ties into Gennadiy\u2019s narrative,\u201d says Hoover. \u201cHe\u2019s somebody who has been fighting for the same changes for years, and he wants Ukraine and Mariupol to be a better place \u2014 he really loves it \u2014 and a lot of his frustrations are the same frustrations that are shared by people who ultimately fled the revolution and people that participated in that.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe interruption of the conflict in many ways hit reset on a lot of what he was doing,\u201d he adds, \u201cand it\u2019s bringing more problems to come, and there\u2019s going to be fallout from this for years. You see Gennadiy kind of getting what he wants, which is this massive shift towards a different future for Ukraine, but it comes at such a heavy cost.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The film was called <i>Crocodile Gennadiy<\/i> when it played the festival circuit, and it got its title from an enormously popular eastern European animated TV show that Mokhnenko identifies with, because the crocodile rescues people.<\/p>\n<p>Clips from the show are a recurring motif throughout the documentary, but Hoover says the film was renamed for its theatrical release partly because the average English-speaking moviegoer wouldn\u2019t have known what to make of the original title.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cUsually people can\u2019t pronounce \u2018Gennadiy,\u2019 \u201d says Hoover. \u201cIt\u2019s a weird spelling, and I think overall it\u2019s just a hard title to wrap your mind around, until after you see the film and then it makes total sense.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBut here\u2019s the thing, for Russians and Ukrainians, they get it immediately. They connect it to Gennadiy as a character, it makes absolute sense.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Does Hoover plan to go back for a follow-up? Not at the moment, partly for safety reasons: his crew was attacked by a group of pro-Russian rebels on their last trip.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019ve been back to Ukraine for a film festival,\u201d says Hoover, \u201cbut I haven\u2019t been back to Mariupol since we were attacked. The airport that we flew into is decimated, so it\u2019s not a safe journey for us. I think it\u2019s something I would like to do in the future, but I don\u2019t see being able to do that for quite a while.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hoover set out to make a film about an unusual pastor. He didn&#8217;t expect to find himself in the middle of a political revolution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3532],"tags":[3679,3678,3677,2691,3680],"class_list":["post-46151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-interviews","tag-almost-holy","tag-gennadiy-mokhnenko","tag-steve-hoover","tag-terrence-malick","tag-ukraine"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Exclusive: Almost Holy director Steve Hoover on his film, about a Ukrainian pastor who &quot;kidnaps&quot; drug-addicted youth<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Hoover set out to make a film about an unusual pastor. 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