Anton Greene, star of Ukrainian film ‘The Guide’ speaks at Cinema Salem

Anton Greene, the lead actor in the 2014 Ukrainian drama “The Guide” about life in mid-1930s Soviet Ukraine, was welcomed at Cinema Salem on Saturday, where the film made its American debut in 2022, to answer questions about the film and provide insight into how its themes of hope and resistance amid tyranny are relevant to the ongoing war in the region.

In the movie, Greene plays 10-year-old Peter Shamrock, whose father is killed after acquiring secret documents detailing a planned mass seizure of food by the Soviets. While Peter escapes with the documents, he spends the rest of the film running from the Soviet Secret Police and bearing witness to the atrocities carried out by the Soviet regime leading up to the historic man-made famine, “the Holodomor,” which killed an estimated 3.5 million to 7 million Ukrainians from 1932 to 1933.

While obviously much has changed in the past 100 years, Greene emphasized that the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is just the most recent development in a century-long conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and much of what the audience sees in the film continues to this day.

“Many of the things you’ll see in this movie — destroying grain, destroying Ukrainian culture, the genocide of Ukrainians, are things that (Russia) is doing right now,” he said. “And I think it’s really important to keep in mind as you watch this movie, which is set almost 100 years ago, just how little has really changed.”

Studying jazz saxophone and political science at the University of Michigan, Greene said acting would most likely not be in his future. Nevertheless, spending summers with relatives in Ukraine every year up until 2019 and being involved in the film has allowed him to connect deeper with his family’s Ukrainian heritage, which happens to have a history of resisting the Soviet regime.

“My family has a lot of resistance fighters in them,” he said. “Both my great-grandparents spent a combined total of 60 years in gulags throughout Siberia, Ukraine, and Russia. My grandfather was actually born in a Soviet prison as a result of that. So my family has this sort of history of actively resisting against the Soviet regime. And so being in this film, and having my role right now as a kind of semi-spokesperson for the film, I feel like I’m really tapping into that aspect of my family.”

Since the film’s American debut in Salem in 2022, it has generated about $150,000 in donations across the United States, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands.

“We’ve arranged for the film to play in about 700 theaters in four countries,” said Marshall Strauss, who co-owns Cinema Salem with his wife Elaine Gerdine. “The agreement was that cinemas could have the film for free, as long as they donated the ticket revenue. That rule has been followed in those four countries enthusiastically.”

At Saturday’s showing, Mayor Dominick Pangallo said, “(Cinema Salem) is much more than a movie theater — it’s a community space, and events like this are really reflective of that. I just came from an event at Old Town Hall for Charlotte Forten, who was an abolitionist, first black graduate of Salem State, and writer, and one of the things she said was ‘liberty makes tyrants tremble,’ and I think about the people of Ukraine and what they’re going through, and what started here with this film to get humanitarian relief for the people of Ukraine.

“And that makes me think that what happens in Salem can change the world. So thank you to Elaine and Marshall, to the staff at Cinema Salem, and to everybody who’s made this film possible to be shown here again.”

Michael McHugh can be contacted at [email protected] or at 781-799-5202