On June 20, the PREMIER online cinema held the debut private screening of the documentary film "Borzenko: Ring Behind Barbed Wire" about the legendary Soviet boxer from Uzbekistan Andrei Borzenko in Tashkent.
Making a high-quality film about sports is not an easy task: any unreliable nuance can cancel out all efforts.
Especially when among the potential critics are people who knew the hero personally.
There were quite a few of them in Tashkent, and they all agreed that the creators of the picture managed to brilliantly cope with the task: it turned out to be deep and multilayered.
The story of Andrey Borzenko is well known in Uzbekistan: he started boxing in Tashkent under the guidance of Sidney Jackson, an American who settled in the republic at the very beginning of the last century.
In 1938 and 1939, Borzenko twice became the champion of the republic, and two years later, when the Great Patriotic War began, he went to the front, where he was wounded in one of the battles, was captured and sent to Buchenwald.
In the same place, after inhuman tortures and other horrors of the concentration camp, he ended up in the ring: in such a perverse way, the fascist administration had fun, pitting the prisoners against each other.
In Buchenwald, Borzenko fought a total of 80 battles and was never defeated, thanks to which, in fact, he remained alive.
Information had to be collected bit by bit, using archival documents - including the diaries of the hero himself.
Thanks to this meticulousness, the portrait (the boxer was played in the film by actor Ivan Fominov, for whom boxing is a serious hobby) turned out to be very bright, recognizable and very real.
This was noted by the children of Borzenko - Andrei and Olga, who were present at the premiere and admitted that they hardly knew their father as a boxer.
It is interesting that Borzenko's son never did or even tried boxing - his mother categorically opposed this.
“I knew that Buchenwald and the boxing fights that took place there were filmed in other countries, but not here.
Therefore, for many years I had a dream that the story of my father would also someday be filmed.
For me and my older sister, this is a significant event, even if the film turned out to be very difficult for us in places.
I myself never saw my father box.
For some reason, I remember very vividly from my childhood life how a film crew came to us, who filmed my father for some kind of television story.
I was about three years old, and I remember this because in the basement where we lived, it was always very dark and cold.
And here people turned on the spotlights and somehow very quickly warmed our entire apartment with them, ”Borzenko Jr. recalled at the premiere.
© Online cinema PREMIER
The generation of Borzenko Sr. is a generation of children wounded and badly beaten by life.
Perhaps that is why in post-war life those who survived the war had such a great need to give love, warmth and care, to make up for what the Great Patriotic War had taken away.
This line is also traced in the film.
After Buchenwald, Andrei had to forget about active boxing due to injury.
Returning to Tashkent, he continued his studies in medicine, where he entered in the pre-war years.
“After Andrey returned to Tashkent in 1946, he often visited our house and became friends with my brother.
They both dreamed of a future profession, both dreamed of becoming surgeons, returning all the wounded and crippled by the war to normal life, helping them with this.
After listening to their conversations, I also entered the medical school - it was simply impossible not to be imbued with the conviction of Andrei and Leo that the doctor is the most humane profession in the world, ”recalled Sydney Jackson’s daughter Paina Katz about this period.
Borzenko really became a very good surgeon.
In addition, for some time he worked as a coach in his boxing school, but not for too long: a sore leg severely limited his professional activity, so the ex-boxer had to retrain as a judge.
According to the people who knew him, in the ring Borzenko the referee was always very principled and fair.
Interestingly, he came to tournaments in two capacities at once: either as a judge or as a doctor.
© Shot from the filming of the film "Borzenko: The Ring Behind Barbed Wire"
Andrei never remembered the war, he did not tell anything about it.
The echo of the events experienced was only one case, which occurred at an international tournament in Samarkand, as one of the good friends of the boxer, Mirsalikh Sagatov, spoke about.
Foreigners lived in the hotel together with the Uzbek team, and one day Borzenko reacted involuntarily to German speech: very sharply, and also in German, he threw some phrase in response to the German who had offended him.
Then he abruptly fell silent and did not utter another word for the rest of the day.
A separate and really large, albeit invisible, layer of the film is the coach.
The personality of Sydney Jackson and the qualities he put into his ward seem to run like a thread through the entire plot.
Together with his son and wife, the coach was buried in Tashkent at the Botkinsky cemetery, not far from the grave of Borzenko and some members of the Pakhtakor football club, whose lives were claimed by a plane crash over Dneprodzerzhinsk in 1979.
At one time, it was Jackson who became the founder of the great Uzbek boxing school, which subsequently gave the world many famous boxers.
© Shot from the filming of the film "Borzenko: The Ring Behind Barbed Wire"
The American, in a certain sense, became the personification of the best features of the profession: he selflessly loved children, he brought many of his wards into the hall from the street only so that hooligan boys would not be left unattended.
He often took students from the gym to his home, fed them, and most importantly, taught that boxing is not a scuffle, but, above all, a deep philosophy of life, the ability to withstand any, even the most difficult life circumstances, not to give up and to the last blow, as no matter how hard it is.
Talking about her father and his legendary ward Andrei Borzenko, Paina especially emphasized this particular aspect of the boxing profession.
“Father never tired of repeating that the ring is a place of battle, where you need to work first of all with your head, and not with your fists.
Andrey turned out to be an excellent student in this regard.
He knew how to perfectly build battle tactics, which my father always taught him, plus an unbending will.
I think that’s why he managed to survive, despite all the horrors of the concentration camp, ”explained Jackson’s daughter.
It’s a paradox, but much of what is written about the legendary boxer on the Internet is not true.
Until the end of his life, he worked as a doctor - in a sports dispensary.
The film, however, became a small, but very important page not only in the history of the hero himself and boxing, but in the history of Uzbekistan, in the history of the Great Patriotic War.
Nothing should and cannot be forgotten - this is exactly how the aftertaste of this chamber premiere remained.
On Wednesday, June 22, the film "Borzenko: The Ring Behind the Barbed Wire" will be released in the PREMIER online cinema.
An open free premiere screening in the Moschino Museum summer cinema is timed to coincide with the launch.
And this movie is definitely worth seeing.