Oksana Mysina
Director
Oksana Mysina is a filmmaker based on the island of Crete in Greece. In tandem with her husband John Freedman she is a co-founder of the independent and experimental Free Flight Films studio.
Mysina's most recent film is the film short Cherry Orchard. War. A Poetic Parable, based on snippets of plays by Anton Chekhov (primarily The Cherry Orchard), and documentary interviews with film and theater artists displaced by revolution in Belarus, and Russia's war against Ukraine. The Cherry Orchard. War project is a big one that will take on various lives in the future, including more shorts, and a full-length feature film. Mysina's previous film was the real-life anti-war short, Escape, which tells the story of a refugee family escaping to Europe at the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Winner of 14 awards in its first year of life, Escape was named Grand Prix winner at the Atlantis International Internet Short Film Festival (New York); Best Emotional Film at the Goldspire International Film Festival (Paris); Most Impactful Film, and Best International Film over 15 Minutes at NewsFest in Santa Monica, CA, and was awarded the top Red Cross award at the Flowers Against Bullets festival (Vienna).
Mysina debuted as a film director in 2020 with the full-length political film Insulted Belarus. Based on a screenplay by famed Belarusian activist and writer/producer Andrei Kureichik, it premiered on the TV Rain channel. Insulted was named Best Experimental Film at the Art Film Awards (Skopje). Mysina followed in 2021 with two film shorts, Ivan Petrovich (at the Goldspire International Film Festival, Paris), and Red, Blue, and Asya, both of which have enjoyed active lives on the festival circuit. Red, Blue, and Asya has garnered some 20 awards at various international festivals, including an Award of Recognition at the Best Shorts Competition in San Diego; Best Female Director and Zero Budget Film at the Iconic Images Film Festival (Vilnius); and Best Director at the Silver Mask Live Festival (Los Angeles). Also in 2021 she created her second full-length political film, Voices of the New Belarus, based on another Andrei Kureichik screenplay. In 2022 she created a short version of Voices under the title of Love is Stronger than Fear. Mysina is currently working on an international film, A Woman and her Angel, a feature film predominantly with Greek actors. She edits her own films, and is her own post-production team.
In her award-winning film acting career, Oksana's work has been seen at festivals and in cinemas throughout the world. Her work in theater has toured to over 20 countries on four continents.
Inside the Film
From the Director
The Road to Antigone is a semi-documentary film in Greek that explores the theme of making hard choices.
The young Antigone, the legendary mythological figure, the tragic heroine – she who did not hesitate to tell the whole world “no” – is the catalyst for thoughts uttered by all the women of the film. What do you do when faced with acute danger? How do you overcome fear? Who is to blame for the world being so unjust?
Our film is a documentary because the women and boys in it were never anything but themselves, although every one of them existed fully in the conditions set before them by the director. Everything here – whether directly or indirectly – flowed from one of the most paradoxical and mysterious heroines of ancient Greek mythology – Antigone, daughter of Oedipus.
For many centuries in many cultures Antigone has been the object of research and study done by philosophers, scholars, and theater artists. As a Russian actress, I found it fascinating to hear and feel what the attitude was to Antigone in the land of ancient Greek mythology, to discover how those who literally ingested the myth with their mother's milk would react to it. What would they think, those who absorbed by osmosis the tragic tale of the young women who placed herself in direct opposition to a complacent, smug and utterly self-satisfied world?
The form of this film is a series of monologues. Its content, however, is naked emotion.
It is a film about the existential loneliness of the human being, at least among the more introspective of them.
This film was intended to be an element in an outdoor theater performance based on Jean Anouilh's play Antigone. But it quickly took on a life of its own and now stands alone as an independent experiment in mixing the devices of documentary and narrative film.