Katerina Braikovska is sitting at the wooden table in the studio kitchen, her hands folded. She talks and tells in a relaxed manner, it is easy to listen to her, she has a pleasant voice. Not too quiet, not too loud, lively and yet under full control. One would like to be more familiar with her voice, because Braikovska can use it to run films in people’s minds, create images, faces, of Oscar winner Emma Stone, for example, of Margot Robbie or Rachel McAdams. But for that you would have to be Ukrainian. Or Ukrainians. Otherwise it won’t work.
Kiev, late Saturday afternoon. The Propeller Studios, for which Katerina Braikovska frequently works as a freelancer, are inconspicuously housed between 25-storey, slender residential towers and bulky Soviet blocks. She is an actress, one of the most famous and sought-after voice actors in the country, especially for Hollywood films. And she’s the director of dubbing, a booming profession. “Yeah,” she says, “we have a lot of work now.”
American blockbusters have always done well in Ukraine. What has hit cinemas in the past decade and a half, in Kiev, Kharkiv, Lviv, has been translated into Ukrainian. There is much more to it now. According to a law in Ukraine, all films and all television series will soon have to be dubbed in Ukrainian. Regardless of whether they are shown on the state channels, on the many private programs or on streaming providers such as Netflix. This is a turning point for Ukraine.
“We started dubbing all Russian films and series into Ukrainian back in December.”
The Ukrainian film market has been shaped by Russia since Soviet times. The gigantic Mosfilm studios in Moscow, Soviet Hollywood, was the mighty slingshot with which film productions were thrown onto the market. And because Russian was the lingua franca and Russian teaching shaped schools for decades, it hardly mattered whether the film audience was watching in Belarus or Ukraine, in Moldova, Armenia or Georgia. This tradition can still be felt today. Most of the films and series shown on Ukrainian television speak Russian, “about 90 percent,” says Katerina Braikovska. Ukrainian has so far been served in the subtitles. This is going to change.
The new law should come into force at the end of next week, but due to the pandemic, the production companies should now be given a little more time. The opposition in parliament senses political reasons for the postponement. When it comes to the Russian and Ukrainian languages, the mood is often irritable. However, hardly anyone doubts that the law will soon come into force. Either way: practically everything is already being prepared. Katerina Braikovska says: “We started dubbing all Russian films and series in Ukrainian back in December. All studios now work 24 hours a day.”
You can read in the news every day how bad the political relationship between Ukraine and Russia is. But it would be a bit easy to see the change in film language politically alone. Kazakhstan is switching from written Cyrillic to Latin; other former Soviet republics have long since done so. In 2006 there was a movie in the national language for the first time in Ukraine. “The 15 years since then have softened the transition,” says Braikovska. “People were being prepared that one day everything would be in Ukrainian.” All news programs and shows are already there anyway.
“We now have the chance to make our own cinema,” says Katerina Braikovska.
(Photo: Frank Nienhuysen)
The actress and voice actress comes from Kiev, she grew up speaking Russian, the language of her parents’ home. But she also says: “If you were born in this country, you should be able to speak the language.” She learned Ukrainian. Very fast. For her, change is therefore less a question of politics, she says, “it’s more of a cultural question”.
The conflict with Russia, the annexation of Crimea, is likely to have accelerated the trend. Braikovska says that Ukraine has produced more and more of its own films in recent years. Russia is still the dominant market in the post-Soviet space. Most of the films come from there, the country has tradition and a lot of experience in assessing which comedy series and which crime series will be popular. And they know: Even if the respective national languages are gaining in importance in everyday life, almost everyone between Kyrgyzstan and Lithuania understands Russian. “Of course we still buy films there,” says Katerina Braikovska, “they’re good at it too. But now we have the chance to make our own cinema too.”
Some series in Ukraine are even produced in Russian
So Ukrainians are increasingly producing their own Ukrainian-language series, and, now it seems paradoxical, even some in Russian. “Because it is easier to sell them abroad,” says Braikovska, “to Belarus, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Latvia.” Whether they are then synchronized there is of course not up to them. For herself, the genre of synchronization means maximum workload, as a speaker and as a director who does castings. “I now go to four or five studios every day for my own recordings. I’ve never made so much money. I can now choose roles, premiere films, for example. But now I also need new actors, new voices.”
Between 200 and 300 Russian films and series have to be translated, for classic television, for Netflix. Challenging logistics. Previous theater actresses and their colleagues benefit from the boom. They are not only needed for the stages now, but also in the studios. But Braikovska admits that there are also critical voices. It’s the power of habit. In the series Svaty for example, which has been around for many years in various seasons. Russian of course. Now she has had a transmitter synchronized into Ukrainian. Technically it is an easy thing, Russian and Ukrainian are different, but of course they are much closer to each other in phonetics and syllable numbers than in the dubbing of English films. “Terrible”, some viewers would have written, they know the episodes and the familiar voices so far.
Katerina Braikovska has to go now, she has an appointment. It is not another studio that she is going to now. She goes to a concert. Classic? “No,” she says, “a pop group. A Russian.”