From frontline to Oscars red carpet: Ukrainian producer swaps body armour for black tie

Published

2 years ago

March 12, 2023

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Do you like movies? I do, but sometimes real life is even crazier than the movies.

Azad Safarov is a Ukrainian producer working with Sky News journalists in Ukraine. He is also the assistant director and line producer for the Oscar-nominated documentary film ‘A House Made Of Splinters’. Here he writes about going from the frontline to the red carpet.

In just a short space of time I have gone from being on the frontline in Ukraine, to preparing to walk the red carpet at the Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles. And it’s a strange feeling.

I was born into a poor family in Azerbaijan, and because of the war in Nagorny Karabakh and financial problems, my family decided to move to Ukraine. We settled in Donetsk and became Ukrainian citizens.

I was eight years old at the time, and even then, all I wanted to do was make movies. My cousin and I filmed short sketches and dreamt of selling them to Hollywood.

My mother advised me to become a journalist, because she believed it was the most peaceful profession in Ukraine. But no sooner had I graduated from university and moved to Kyiv in 2014, the protests on the Maidan began – and consequently the war.

As a television journalist, I’ve worked everywhere in Ukraine. Under fire on the frontline, and undercover in the Russian-occupied territory of Ukraine.

My point is, I am much more comfortable in a 12-kilogram bulletproof vest and a helmet than a black-tie tuxedo.

I applied for a special 21-day permit to leave the country when I was told that I was going to the ceremony.

How to watch all the big films nominated for Oscars and BAFTAs

It was granted, and I decided I wanted to wear a sweatshirt or a t-shirt, anything with an inscription or the state coat of arms of Ukraine. But they explained to me that the organisers would simply not let me inside, there is a strict dress code.

‘Deprived of the right to be happy’

I’ve been dreaming of this moment all my life.

I used to watch Oscar ceremonies and imagine winning; I’d imagine how proud my parents, friends and family would be if I ever won the award.

But now the moment has come, and I have a nomination, I can’t say it too loudly or be too happy about it.

“Aren’t you jumping for joy?! This is the Oscars! That’s super cool!” my friends say to me all the time.

I am happy, of course, but the joy is mixed with sadness, because as long as I am here in Los Angeles, on the frontline in Ukraine every day, every hour really, soldiers are dying, protecting our country from our neighbour.

I cannot post funny pictures on social media, because at this very time, millions of Ukrainian civilians are suffering from Russia’s aggression and missiles.

It feels like Russia has deprived us of the right to be happy, to be successful, the right to enjoy life, the right to simply laugh out loud.

The consequences of war

Our Oscar-nominated documentary film, A House Made of Splinters, is also about the consequences of the war.

The director is the talented Danish filmmaker Simon Lereng Wilmont who I started working with back in 2015, and this is our second film from Ukraine. The first one, The Distant Barking of Dogs, made the Oscar shortlist in 2019.

A House Made of Splinters is about children growing up in a temporary shelter next to the war. It is sad, but at the same time, it is a film about hope. It’s about how Ukrainian children fight for their own happiness, childhood, and the right to live in a family and feel love, even while the war rages on.

It’s an important story to tell, and we have an important mission that goes beyond.

I co-founded the NGO, the Voices of Children Charitable Foundation, with the documentary’s consultant and human rights activist Olena Rozvadovska, and after the Russian invasion, we helped thousands of children, and their families evacuate from the frontline. But the needs are only growing.

The entire production team understands that we are competing with big companies and big names at the Oscars, with big budgets for advertising their nominees.

But to win would be incredible, in these dark times we want to give at least one small piece of joy to the country, which has been fighting for freedom and the happiness of being free for so long.

And with this in mind, I will go to the ceremony and hope for the best. I will take two things with me: my father’s broken watch – he died when I was 13 years old – and a brooch in the colours of the Ukrainian flag.

And no, I will not disable the air raid alert app on my phone if there is a notification about it from Ukraine, because to me, the Oscars is one more platform to remind the world about the war.

You can watch the Academy Awards on Sunday 12 March from 11pm exclusively on Sky News and Sky Showcase. And for everything you need to know ahead of the ceremony, don’t miss our special Backstage podcast, out now, plus look out for our special episode on the winners from Monday morning.

Entertainment

‘Music is back’ as Taylor Swift helps drive record UK sales

Published

3 hours ago

January 8, 2025

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'Music is back' as Taylor Swift helps drive record UK sales

UK music sales hit a 20-year high of £2.4bn in 2024, helped by pop megastar Taylor Swift’s latest album, and driven by streaming and the vinyl revival, figures show.

Revenues from recorded music reached an all-time high, more even than at the peak of the CD era, according to annual figures from the digital entertainment and retail association ERA.

Total consumer spending on recorded music – both subscriptions and purchases – topped the previous record of £2.2bn in 2001, ERA said.

Takings from streaming services including Spotify, YouTube Music, and Amazon rose by 7.8% to a little over £2bn.

Almost £200m was spent on vinyl albums, an annual uplift of 10.5%, while CD album revenues were flat at just over £126m.

Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department was the biggest-selling album of the year, aided by her record-smashing worldwide Eras tour.

More than 783,000 copies were bought, nearly 112,000 of them on vinyl – making it 2024’s biggest-selling vinyl album.

The biggest single of the year was Noah Kahan’s Stick Season, generating the equivalent of 1.99 million sales.

ERA chief executive Kim Bayley said 2024 was “a banner year for music, with streaming and vinyl taking the sector to all-time-high records in both value and volume.

Ms Bayley called it the “stunning culmination of music’s comeback which has seen sales more than double since their low point in 2013. We can now say definitively – music is back.”

Despite the increasingly strong performance by the British music industry, artists are said to be receiving less money.

Experts have said the musicians make less than people would think because of the role of streaming – platforms do not normally pay artists directly and divide any owed payments among the rights holders of songs.

Music revenues grew by 7.4% in 2024, while video rose by 6.9%, and games fell by 4.4%, according to preliminary figures.

Subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV grew by 8.3% to £4.5bn – almost 90% of the sector’s revenues.

Deadpool & Wolverine was the biggest-selling title of the year, with sales of 561,917 – more than 80% of them sold digitally.

Despite the games sector’s 4.4% decline last year, it remains nearly twice as large as the recorded music business.

Full game sales saw a drop-off with PC download-to-own down 5%, digital console games down 15% and boxed physical games down 35%, in favour of subscription models which grew by 12%.

EA Sports FC 25 – formerly known as Fifa was once again the biggest-selling game of the year, generating 2.9 million unit sales, 80% of them as digital formats.

Entertainment

Kieran Culkin on receiving notes from Jesse Eisenberg on A Real Pain: ‘I’d automatically get defensive’

Published

11 hours ago

January 8, 2025

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Kieran Culkin on receiving notes from Jesse Eisenberg on A Real Pain: 'I'd automatically get defensive'

Kieran Culkin says he doesn’t care if his projects get badly reviewed as long as he enjoyed himself doing them.

The 42-year-old recently won best supporting actor in a motion picture at the Golden Globes for his performance in A Real Pain.

He tells Sky News he isn’t dependent on positive feedback, but it is “cool” when people find a connection to his work.

“I’m doing this [acting] around 36 years. I’ve been sort of trained or whatever, conditioned, to just not care what an audience response is to something,” he says.

“I’ve been in plays that I think ‘this is bad, but I’m enjoying it’. I don’t really care or if it gets poorly reviewed, I don’t really care. So I still sort of have that mentality but it’s actually quite nice that people are connecting with [A Real Pain]. To hear people that have seen it say, I know a guy like Benji or talk about him, it’s like that’s what this feeling is”.

The Succession actor stars alongside Jesse Eisenberg in the film about cousins who take a trip to Poland to see the country their grandmother left.

Culkin says taking notes from a co-star, who also wrote and directed the film, was a new and challenging experience.

“That’s tough; it just is,” he says.

“[Jesse] would give me a note, my chest would puff up and I would automatically get really defensive, like, I’m gonna hit this guy.”

‘The biggest taboo on a movie’

Eisenberg says playing the role and being the filmmaker made him “nervous” because he sees actors giving notes to be the “biggest taboo on a movie”.

“You don’t give an actor notes – never do that. You can commit arson on a movie set before you can give an actor notes,” he says.

A Real Pain is set in Poland and is inspired by a real-life trip Eisenberg took with his now wife Anna Strout more than 20 years ago to retrace his family’s roots.

“Had the war not happened, this is where I would be living,” he says – and so looking at Poland and its history became a huge inspiration to him.

The Now You See Me actor first wrote a play, The Revisionist, which debuted off-Broadway in 2013, and spent the decade redeveloping it to become the “buddy road trip” A Real Pain.

‘It’s this beautiful, warm, welcoming country’

The film weaves through the story of cousins reconnecting on their journey to visit, for the first time, their grandmother’s home before she was displaced during the Holocaust.

Eisenberg is currently in the process of gaining Polish citizenship and says his relationship with the country has changed over the years.

He says: “With Polish heritage, you grow up hearing that it was the site of the murder of all of your family and you hear that it’s bleak and especially if you’re a kid of the 80s and 90s like I am, you hear about bread lines from the Soviet era. And so going there was just unbelievably the polar opposite of what I had heard growing up.

“It’s this beautiful, warm, welcoming country and not only beautiful, warm and welcoming, but like what they did for me and allowed me to do, to tell my family’s story, to be able to shoot at a concentration camp, to be able to shoot on this very hallowed grounds of the various locations we were on was just amazing. I’m in such debt to them.”

‘I grew up knowing performance was normal’

A Real Pain looks at how a person’s family history can shape who they become.

Eisenberg says growing up with a mother who worked as a birthday party clown helped him see acting as an attainable career.

He says: “Every morning I saw this woman get dressed up in a ridiculous outfit and put on crazy face makeup and tune her guitar to the piano. So, I grew up knowing that performance was normal.

“I didn’t grow up thinking that people who perform are weird and actors are weird and why do they? You know, I grew up thinking to behave in this silly way can be a professional job.

“So it just stayed in me. And now what we do is kind of ridiculous, but we take it seriously.”

A Real Pain is in cinemas now.

Entertainment

‘Music is back’ as Taylor Swift helps drive record UK sales

Published

15 hours ago