Scream of My Blood | Gogol Bordello documentary

[BluBonnet]

Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hütz, ‘Scream of My Blood’ Filmmakers on Capturing Punk Band’s Story

Eugene Hütz, founder and frontman with U.S. gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello, would likely to have ended up a painter wearing “dirty pants and long hair” had his parents not left the Soviet Union when he was 16.

“I would probably have become a painter, as there was more of a path paved in that in my family,” he says. “I was drawing most of my childhood and my uncle – Mikhail Mykolayev – is a pretty well-known painter who still lives in Kyiv.”

Fresh from playing a brief, impromptu solo guitar gig at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, following the international premiere of a new documentary about the band, “Scream of My Blood: A Gogol Bordello Story,” Hütz fits the bill, although his khaki cargo pants are not paint spattered.

The singer was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, but the Hütz family left years of Communist oppression behind and moved to Western Europe in the dying days of the Soviet empire. His father had always been a non-conformist – something which spelt trouble in the Soviet Union – and Eugene says that even at the age of nine, teachers had him down as a dangerously independent thinker. But it was the meltdown at the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power station in 1986 that finally forced the decision to leave.

By the time he was 17, after living as a refugee in several countries, the family had been granted U.S. immigration visas and settled in Burlington, Vermont. Eugene – who had already been playing in proto-punk bands in Kyiv – thought his creative life had come to an end in the small New England city. But a walk down the main street – which had several indie record stores – restored his hopes, and when he bumped into some teenaged punk rockers, expressed his delight with a heavily-accented reference to San Francisco punk band Dead Kennedys. The local kids looked at this weird new arrival in town and said “Sex…” to which Hütz responded: “Pistols.”

The story, told in “Scream of My Blood: A Gogol Bordello Story,” directed by Nate Pommer and Eric Weinrib, is a small part of the jigsaw that is Gogol Bordello. Presented at a packed-out Special Screening Thursday in the Bohemian Spa town from which the festival takes its name, it was its first screening in Europe after its world premiere last month at New York’s Tribeca festival. The choice of Karlovy Vary has some historical resonance for Hütz: Nikolai Gogol, the Ukrainian-born writer, was a visitor at the Bohemian Spa town’s famous Grand Hotel Pupp in 1845. The imposing and ornate hotel is where festival VIPs stay, and it records Gogol’s visit in a brass plaque set in the cobbled entrance courtyard, alongside other illustrious visitors, including Richard Wagner in 1835, Luis Buñuel in 1956, and John Travolta in 2013.