Documentary: “And Volodya Became Zelensky,” when a life becomes destiny
Nothing called him to become one of the most famous and admired men in the world. Or perhaps everything did. This is the question that haunts the viewer as the end credits roll in Ariane Chemin and Yves Jeuland's two-part documentary, And Volodya Became Zelensky .
Punctuated by the Ukrainian president's own words, the archive footage and testimonies of his loved ones paint a portrait of a personality who never ceased to transcend the ordinary aspects of his existence. The reference to Charlie Chaplin, whom he admired and regularly quoted—it was as Charlie Chaplin that he won a very popular television dance competition—is no accident. Like him, albeit in a minor way, he made just as many assets of his small size, his lively gaze, his inexhaustible energy, and his comic talent.
From his birth in 1978 in the mining town of Kryvyi Rih to the premonitory television series Servant of the People in which he plays… a president, Volodymyr Zelensky possesses this irresistible charisma that welds around him lasting friendships and devotions. Few contradict in the documentary which gives voice to his companions of the Kvartal 95, this troupe of acrobats who delight the public with glittery and energetic shows. This instinctive force, much more than a theorization of the political role that an “average man” can assume, collides with a major event.
Already shaken by the annexation of Crimea and the Donbass war, Volodya, now Zelensky, shifted into another personal and historical dimension on February 24, 2022. Refusing all proposals for exfiltration from Ukraine, the president himself acknowledged that the Russian aggression, which he had not expected , "changed everything" and that the Boutcha massacre "made him fall off the cliff." How far away the time of schoolboy jokes on TV sets seems...
La Croıx
