Welcome to this episode of the Creating Dangerously Podcast sponsored by the Shawna Foundation. Today we have the privilege of speaking with the director, Iryna Pravylo and producer Yulia Zi of the documentary film Flowers Beyond the Dark, which will be screening at the Massachusetts Independent Film Festival, which runs from April 2 -4 in Worcester.



“Flowers beyond the Dark” is an artful exploration of the human side of war, a raw witness account of people who know what it’s like to stare the enemy in the eyes, feel the pain, yet maintain hope and determination for victory. All while facing the prospect of being a victim of genocide. We get to know them, follow them in church, at home, behind the artist’s canvas, and in armored vehicles. 



Important links



Film’s website: https://www.righttimestudios.com/flowersbeyondthedark


Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/flowersbeyondthedark/


Raphael Lemkin’s article: https://holodomormuseum.org.ua/en/publikacija/raphael-lemkin-soviet-genocide-in-ukraine-article-in-33-languages/

Book about the Holodomor: 
https://www.amazon.com/Red-Famine-Stalins-War-Ukraine/dp/0385538855


Mass Indie Film Fest Schedule: https://www.shawnafoundation.org/


Ukrainian Poem by Yevhen Stankovych: https://music.apple.com/us/album/ukrainian-poem/1195984640?i=1195985111

Join Patrick Bracken and Skip Shea as they drown in the sea of the never-ending daily stories of bad news. Nothing like cold coffee and stale diet cola to lift those existential blues. But then there is the cost of Bruce Springsteen Tickets.

This Episode:

This year’s Oscar nominees arrive at a moment when the world feels politically unstable, socially fragmented, and morally uncertain. The films we’re discussing today—Sinners, One Thing After Another, It Was Just an Accident, and, in tribute to the recently departed Béla Tarr, his masterpiece Werckmeister Harmonies—all wrestle with questions about responsibility, truth, and the fragility of social order.

In very different ways, these films remind us that cinema has always been a mirror for its time, reflecting the anxieties, contradictions, and ethical dilemmas of the moment we’re living in.

Taken together, these films suggest that the most powerful stories today are not simply about heroes or villains, but about systems—systems that shape how people behave, how truth is defined, and how communities respond to fear and uncertainty.

Whether through allegory, satire, or stark realism, filmmakers continue to ask the same question that great cinema has always asked: when institutions falter, what responsibility falls on the individual?

The Modern Classics Audio Play Series revisits foundational texts not to preserve them in amber, but to place them in conversation with the present. In this episode we adapt Ernest Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants. The original story, linked below, is a tense conversation between an American man and his girlfriend at a Spanish train station, revolving around an unspoken, implied abortion.

Hemingway wrote Hills Like White Elephants at a moment when patriarchy, empire, and authority were rarely questioned aloud. Yet the story itself is built on tension rather than certainty—on what is said too often, what is not said at all, and who is ultimately asked to carry the weight of a decision.

Hemingway’s work frequently exposes power as something maintained through calm insistence and silence rather than moral clarity. In this story, the imbalance of voice reveals an underlying instability: the fear that inherited authority may no longer be enough.

This adaptation reframes that instability. By shifting the center of the narrative from persuasion to choice, it foregrounds autonomy as an act of courage rather than defiance. The woman’s decision is not presented as a conflict to be won, but as a departure—quiet, deliberate, and irreversible.

In keeping with the mission of the Shawna E. Shea Memorial Foundation, this production reflects a broader commitment to amplifying voices that step away from coercive structures and toward self-definition. The play invites listeners to sit with uncertainty, to listen closely, and to recognize that change often begins not with argument, but with clarity—and the resolve to leave the table.

Gregory Velez: The Host

Tiziana Guarini: The Woman

Patrick Bracken: The American

Claudia Zonetti: The Barista

Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway