Kyiv, January 2014: The Square on the Maidan

A film about one square, shown on another

The Square (Al Midan) is Jehane Noujaim's documentary of the Egyptian revolution as lived on Cairo's Tahrir Square, from the fall of Hosni Mubarak in 2011 to the removal of Mohamed Morsi in 2013. It premiered at Sundance, was nominated for an Academy Award, and reached Netflix in the United States in January 2014; in Egypt it could not be shown officially until June 2014, a December 2013 screening in Cairo having been pulled at the last moment ². In Kyiv in January 2014 the title became literal: maidan is the Ukrainian word for square, and the protest camp on Independence Square was in its third month ⁴.

The founder of Open Air Cinema was in Kyiv when parliament passed the laws of 16 January 2014 restricting movement and expression. He knew the filmmakers, asked them for translation rights and for free, unlimited screenings in Ukraine, and a Ukrainian dub and subtitles were made in the city in four days ^1,3. The first screening produced by the Open Air Cinema Foundation Ukraine — founded on 21 November 2013 — took place behind the occupied City Hall, on a 20-foot inflatable screen set up in about thirty minutes on a day an attack by riot police was rumoured; the Ukrainian studio Babylon'13 recorded it in a short called Forbidden Movie ⁴.

The bicycle opposite Khreshchatyk metro

The evening after the laws passed, the screening moved onto a bicycle. Країна's reporter described the rig: an oval screen held by two metal struts, reinforced with car tyres; a bicycle beside it with the rear wheel clamped; a generator the size of a laptop power supply; and, as long as someone pedalled, enough power for a compact projector, loudspeakers and the phone from which the film was streamed ^1,3. Every screening opened with Shame, a short from the Babylon'13 project that studies the faces of the riot police, and Life in a Day was shown as well ¹. Nothing electrical was published about the rig: the generator is described only by its size, and no wattage, buffer or projector model appears in any source ¹.

The arrangement is the ancestor of the Cinebike documented on Hackaday the following year — a single bicycle, a small generator and a compact projector — and of the CineBike the Open Air Cinema Foundation Ukraine went on to field at Kyiv cycling events ⁵; the same design later travelled to Mexico as the donated bicigenerador of Cine Bajo el Cielo ⁶.

Six screenings, then a ban

Six screenings were held before the Security Service of Ukraine described them as foreign interference in mass disturbances in Kyiv; on 22 January 2014 the organiser was barred from entering Ukraine ^1,3. His account of the following days, as published by Країна, is of police close by, a phone that kept switching itself off, questions put to his landlord and, by 25 January, officers at the door; the United States Embassy told him it could not guarantee his safety and advised him to leave at once. Activists from the Maidan hid the equipment and took him to the airport. The equipment was later found and stolen ^1,3.

The year after

By the autumn of 2014 the Foundation described its CineBike as an innovative bicycle powered outdoor movie system that "has already become a legend among Kyiv cyclists": at the Kyiv Cyclists' Association's Road Safety for Cyclists Day it showed documentary shorts on cycling infrastructure to invited guests and passers-by, and finding a volunteer to pedal the generator on a breezy autumn day "wasn't a problem at all" ⁵. On 21 November 2014, the anniversary of the Revolution of Dignity, the Foundation projected four hours of surveillance-camera footage from the protests at the Academy of Arts, and in the evening Babylon'13's documentary was shown on the same 20-foot inflatable screen that had stood behind City Hall a year earlier, Forbidden Movie among the films ⁴.