Balka - Three Stories

Mike Fishman of Ourspacemovieblog recently sat down with filmmakers/sisters Anya Meksin (M.F.A. Candidate in Film, Columbia University) and Leeza Meksin (a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist) to discuss their short documentary, Balka – Three Stories. Excerpts from that conversation follow.

Synopsis: Balka – Three Stories chronicles the lives of women struggling with drug use and HIV in Ukraine. Through the course of the film we meet Zina and Mirina – best friends and active drugs users about to discover their HIV status; Tanya, a mother of two who has transitioned into substitution treatment but whose husband continues to use drugs; and Galya, a former user who now works as a peer-to-peer outreach worker. Balka - Three Stories was made with the support of the Open Society Institute’s International Harm Reduction Development Program and the Institute for International Education’s Fulbright Program.


Mike Fishman for Ourspacemovieblog (MF): Anya, I’m most familiar with your work as a narrative filmmaker. What made you want to make a documentary and where did the idea for Balka - Three Stories come from?

Anya Meksin (AM): Well, Leeza and I had been developing a documentary project exploring our family’s background in the former Soviet Union; in Ukraine, Moscow and Uzbekistan. We’re immigrants to the U.S. and we wanted to make a quirky documentary about our relationship and our family’s background. We were trying to raise money to make that film and go to Eastern Europe, and we couldn’t. But one day I was talking to one of my best friends from college, Sophie Pinkham, and I was telling her how much we really wanted to go to Ukraine; she was in Ukraine on a Fulbright Scholarship at the time researching harm reduction, which is the concept of reducing the risk associated with dangerous behaviors like drug use or sex work. She suggested we come and make a film about what she was doing, working with women drug users and the programs that try to serve them. She also suggested that we apply for funding through the Open Society Institute where she has close connections, so we drafted a proposal based on the expertise that she could bring to the project as a producer and the filmmaking and language skills that we could bring. That became our opportunity to go to Eastern Europe, and from there it transformed into this incredibly meaningful project for us.

MF: You wrote a treatment?

AM: Yes, we outlined that we would do three short segments each on a different woman dealing with different aspects of drug use. We knew that we were going to go to three different cities and we gave ourselves freedom to find those stories. The only subject we knew about for sure was Tanya and her children, as she was someone Sophie already knew. Sophie had traveled extensively to the places we were going to film in and knew the people who ran the programs there, so she had a lot of contacts. Every time we got to a city we were welcomed and taken around. Our work was meeting a lot of people and deciding who the other subjects would be. We spoke to many different people and what we originally pitched didn’t necessarily turn out to be what we found; obviously, with a documentary you often have many unexpected developments.

MF: Structurally, each segment gets more positive; you start with two women (Zina and Marina) who are in different states of denial, then move to Tanya who put her life back together, and finish with Galya, who has not only put her life back together but is actively helping other people.

Leeza Meksin (LM): We started filming in Poltava, which is where Galya is doing all this good work, and as soon as we worked with her we knew she was this light of hope, which is the name of the organization she works for (Light of Hope). She really embodied that positive idea. We knew that she would probably be the most positive of all the people that we would come across, so it was then, at the very beginning of filming, that we started to envision this progression. We wanted to cover all kinds of situations, not just limit it to a sort of “feel good, you can do it” theme, but also people who are really struggling while getting harm reduction services in some way. We really wanted to show a range of situations but it wasn’t until we filmed the first section that we realized it would probably be the last section in the film.

AM: I remember when we filmed the garden scene with Galya and I felt it would be an amazing place to end the film. I remember this moment of following her around the garden and through the foliage and the way the sunlight was. I had an emotional experience following her with the camera, and it felt to me like that should be the emotion we leave the audience with. And it ended up working out that way.

MF: What were your roles vis-à-vis the filmmaking process?

AM: I did the camera and Leeza did the sound.

MF: So it was just you two?

AM: And Sophie, as the producer; she was with us all the time. Basically we did the technical aspects while Sophie took a lead in organizing our shooting schedule and coordinating with people. All three of us can speak Russian, but she knows the most about the topic, so it was essential to have her.

MF: There are quite a few unexpected moments, such as when Tanya is crossing a very shaky bridge or in Gala’s segment where the drug dealer starts yelling at her dog and threatens to beat the dog –

LM: Yes, there were definitely certain things that happened that afterwards we were like, “Did we get that? I hope we got that!” And we made a practice of reviewing the footage every night (Anya used a CANON XH-A1s) so we had a sense each day of what we were getting and what we still needed to get. But we definitely found that in the end, we got the most interesting material just by being in the right place at the right time.

AM: I was used to narrative filmmaking where you’re working on a film set, and you position the camera in exactly the place you need it to be. Here, I was working much more on an emotional level, in response to what was happening, what was unfolding in front of the camera. And the challenge for me was to not let that translate into moving the camera too much, changing the angle, zooming in or out. In those moments when the material was strongest and unexpected, I tried to sort of shut down a little bit as a cinematographer, to just capture what was happening. I was basically just watching what was happening.

LM: Some of those moments became humorous, like when the dog you mentioned started barking and Lena goes nuts yelling obscenities at her dog –

AM: And the camera shakes! I was actually a little scared.

(Both laugh.)

MF: So in those moments, you purposefully refrained from doing anything with the camera other than just continue shooting.

AM: Right, if I felt like if it was obvious something dramatic was happening –

LM: It’s best to keep the camera neutral.

AM: Exactly. And there were times when that was very difficult, to just be neutral, especially in the scene where Zina found out she had HIV. That was an incredibly challenging scene while I was in the (roaming HIV testing) van with her and when we were outside, she was in such dire need of counseling, just reassurance and dialogue. What appears in the film is just a small part of the conversation we all were having.

LM: When we were trying to comfort them.

MF: With the camera on or off?

LM: The camera kept running but when we were editing, it seemed unnatural to include our voices suddenly, and there was a lot of conversation that happened that included us, which kind of highlighted the fact that no counseling really happened from the nurse who tested Zina in the van. It almost felt wrong to be filming -- it was so intimate and personal, so we had to cut out almost all of it and just tie together enough to get across the situation.

MF: Clearly that was a line you had to walk often, how intimate do you get, as the access you were permitted is quite remarkable, such as when Zina injects a needle into her groin. Was that due to Sophie’s connections that you obtained such access?

AM: Sophie didn’t really know the subjects although of course she knew the people who ran the harm reduction organizations. I think it was mostly due to the fact that they were women, we were young women, and we made it a priority to become friends with them and to treat them like collaborators and to let them into the goal of the film.

LM: We spent a lot of time just hanging out with them, not filming, and I think that helped to put them at ease. And so a lot of the best filming would happen the last few days we had with them because by then they could be open with us, they felt like friends and they didn’t feel judged, which was really important. I think they all felt honored to be part of a project on this topic. They realized how important their message may be for other women in their situation, and they wanted to share their stories honestly so maybe it would help others like them.

MF: Do you think the fact that you were sisters made it feel more comfortable or safe for them?

LM: I think so. When we finished filming Zina and Marina’s section, which was the last section we filmed, our father, who was born in Ukraine, came to meet us, and I think the fact that this older man, our father, was warm and open and not judging them either, meant a lot to them.

AM: And the fact that we were Eastern European. It would have been a much more difficult project to film if we were, say, Americans and we came to sort of look down on them. It meant a lot that we were immigrants, that we shared a lot with them, even small things like “That’s the same tea set my aunt had when we were growing up.” There was a feeling of intimacy.

MF: The term Balka, which refers to the wooded area where people go to buy and do drugs –

AM: A Balka is a regional term used to refer to a low lying wooded area outside of town where often a stream or river used to be but that has dried up. During World War II, Jewish people in Ukrainian towns were often rounded up and shot in the balkas, so they are also the sites of mass graves.

MF: Marked or unmarked?

LM: Sometimes they have stones that will say something like “A thousand peaceful civilians were shot here by the Nazis.” But they never make mention of the fact that they were all Jews, and a lot of the sites don’t even have that.

MF: The people who go there to buy and do drugs, even if there is no marker, they’re aware of that history?

AM: Yeah, absolutely.

MF: So, with no connection to its emotional history, a Balka is, for them, a place where it’s safe to buy and do drugs.

AM: Right, it’s this marginal pace on the outskirts of town –

LM: That’s not policed or monitored.

AM: Exactly. It’s like this no man’s land. Of course, we were struck with the allegorical resonance of the setting as a marginal place outside of society, as many of the women we met exist on the margins of their society.

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