The great Ingmar Bergman once observed: “No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.” His words continue to resonate today, carried by the evocative waters of the Venetian Lagoon towards the island of San Servolo, where, from September 10 to 12, the ONA Short Film Festival once again takes shape. 

At its core lies a belief in cinema as the ideal medium through which to convey messages that originate in sporting culture before transcending sport itself and reaching towards something deeper. Something capable, indeed, of touching the conscience, stirring emotion and reaching those hidden chambers of the soul. Of teaching us to open our perspectives towards other corners of the world, other communities and other individuals.

As has now become a tradition, we accompany this meaningful gathering with a dedicated editorial series. At the heart of this focus are director Gar O’Rourke and his short film, ‘Kachalka’.

As always, we like to begin with something we consider fundamental to every person we interview, just as it is to every filmmaker taking part in the ONA Short Film Festival: from childhood to the present day, what kind of relationship have you developed with the imagery and imagination of sport? In what ways has sport been, and does it continue to be, a source of inspiration in the way you see the world?

Gar O’Rourke: “I think everyone will have a different answer to this kind of question. For me, I never really fitted neatly into the world of sport. I was a skateboarder for a very long time and, almost by definition, skateboarders didn’t like to think of what they did in those terms. We were always outsiders. But skateboarding is incredibly athletic, while also possessing a very deep creative dimension. That was always central to me, and it really shaped who I am as a person, how I think about the world and even how I perceive space itself. As a skateboarder, you look at the built urban environment differently from most people. And when I think about the parallels between that and ‘Kachalka,’ they become quite clear. Here is a gym built from salvaged Soviet materials, where people have reimagined what those materials could ultimately become. I think there is a real parallel between those two ways of looking at the world.

Now, as an adult, sport is very important to me. I work out and train quite often, I run, and I like to stay active. I also think movement is intrinsically connected to creativity in some way. There is creative momentum and there is physical momentum, and I think there is a crossover between the two. But I’m not a great team player. I’ve always gravitated towards individual sports such as rock climbing, surfing and skateboarding. The closest I get to team sports these days is probably playing padel with someone else, or tennis. Basketball is a sport I’m too small to play, but if I were taller, I’d love to. So, yes, that’s more or less my history, or perhaps my non-history, with sport.”

How, on the other hand, did visual storytelling enter your life? What does it represent to you today? 

Gar O’Rourke: “My journey towards visual storytelling began in a fairly unexpected way. I was a terrible student at school. I think I was already a creative person, but I didn’t realise it at the time: I simply thought I was bad at school. Fortunately, because my grades were so poor, art college was really the only option available to me. So I moved to London for a few years and studied landscape architecture, which, in some ways, feels strangely appropriate in relation to ‘Kachalka.’ Landscape architecture is concerned with the built environment and with how we interact with design in our everyday lives. My studies focused particularly on public space—city parks, squares, the public realm—rather than garden design. 

I eventually worked as a landscape architect for about three months before realising that I wasn’t very good at it. At the same time, I had always been obsessed with making videos because of my skateboarding background. Moving image is deeply embedded in that culture. Skateboarding has an extraordinary relationship with video and photography, and I think that sensibility was simply in my bones. Even then, though, I didn’t realise I wanted to become a director until I was perhaps twenty-four or twenty-five. By that point I had tried an enormous number of different things: I once counted more than sixteen different jobs.

Eventually, I realised that directing was probably the right path for me. I never went to film school, and from the very beginning I was making projects for very practical reasons: people would give me an opportunity to work on a small video shoot, I would earn some money from it, and gradually I built a portfolio. If you looked at what I was making ten years ago and compared it with the work I’m fortunate enough to do today, you would probably be quite surprised. The scale is now much larger and the work has become considerably more artistic. But the constant throughout that entire journey has been an enormous enthusiasm for the craft itself. Whatever the job was, I genuinely enjoyed doing it: whether I was filming a wedding in Toronto, a communion for someone from the Irish Traveller community, corporate films, or any of the many other projects I worked on. The thread connecting all of them was simply a love of making films.

Today I’m very fortunate to be able to make films that I personally want to make. Documentary, in particular, gives me a way of commenting on the world we are living in, or offering a perspective on it, without having to do so too explicitly. A documentary can function as entertainment while carrying something more substantial beneath the surface, something that speaks truthfully to the particular time in which we are living. That is why I have remained committed to documentary filmmaking, and I feel incredibly fortunate and privileged that I’m now able to do it all the time. 

I’m probably the last person you should ask for advice on how to become a director, because I spent about six years moving in every possible direction before realising that this was what I wanted to do. But rather beautifully, ‘Kachalka’ was my first short film, and remains one of the very few short films I have ever made. I poured so much love, passion and everything I had into that film. In many ways, it contains the very things that motivated me to become a director in the first place.”

‘Kachalka’: a remarkable place, described in the short documentary as a Mecca of sport in Kyiv. How did you first encounter this singular space? And what made you feel that its story needed to be told?

Gar O’Rourke: “All you need to do is look at a single image of that gym and it immediately sparks your curiosity. It is an incredibly unusual place. This was in 2018, when my brother was living in Kyiv and working out there. One day, he sent me a WhatsApp video while he was training, and I remember thinking, ‘What the fuck is this place?’ It looked like he was on the set of ‘Mad Max.’ I was completely blown away by how unusual it was, and by the creativity behind every single piece of training equipment. I was equally fascinated by the people who went there: the men and women who inhabited that space. Within a couple of weeks of seeing that first video, I was on a plane to Kyiv. I wanted to understand the place and began researching the possibility of making a film about it. 

When I first visited, it was the middle of winter. Everything was covered in ice and it was around minus ten degrees. I walked into the gym and the first person I saw was this guy who must have been about seven feet tall, shirtless, with steam billowing off his back. Within ten seconds, I remember thinking, ‘Holy shit, I have to make this film.’ Initially, it was the physical space itself that fascinated me. But as I began to understand how Kachalka operated, and who the people going there were, it became much more interesting. 

There is no real hierarchy. It is the kind of place where a street cleaner can work out alongside a movie star. Everyone is simply there to train. I’ve always been drawn to places without clear divisions between people, and I fell in love with that quality at Kachalka. It might sound slightly Soviet as a way of thinking about it, but there was something about that absence of hierarchy that really appealed to me. I did a lot of research before making the film and interviewed many of the people who went there. The first time I visited, I made it my mission to speak to as many people as possible. And when you’re that open to talking to anyone, you inevitably end up meeting some pretty unusual characters.

For example, I met this guy who almost seemed like a cult leader. Whenever he spoke, there would be ten people gathered around listening. He told me they all went swimming in the river on Sundays. It was around minus ten, so the river was basically full of ice. I told him I’d join them, but that I didn’t have a swimsuit. He said, ‘Don’t worry, we all swim naked.’ So I went down there, took off my clothes and, when everyone entered the water, realised I was the only person who was naked. For a shy Irish person it was quite a formative experience. But I really enjoyed it. The whole thing felt slightly wild. 

More importantly, though, there was an incredibly strong sense of community, and I found that beautiful. Think about the gyms we normally pay a membership to use. There’s music playing, mirrors everywhere, and everyone exists within their own little world. I was at the gym this morning and it was exactly like that: people have their headphones on and don’t really want to talk to anyone. What I love about Kachalka is that people spend time together. They talk to one another. It almost feels like a social club rather than simply somewhere you go to work out. There was something very pure and very honest about it.”

On one side, there is an ever-evolving collection of DIY equipment, rooted in craftsmanship that began during the Soviet era and has continued to transform into the present day. On the other, an extraordinarily diverse community of people: across genders, generations, styles and ways of inhabiting the space. What was it like to immerse yourself in such a singular social, sporting and even artistic environment? And given everything that surrounds Kyiv today, what thoughts and emotions arise when you look back at ‘Kachalka’?

Gar O’Rourke: “One of the challenges you always face in documentary filmmaking is that you can never represent everyone. You would like to, but it is almost impossible. What mattered to me was being honest and showing the kinds of people you would genuinely encounter there on an ordinary day. That was one of the things that really touched me. You might see a ninety-year-old grandfather teaching his ten-year-old grandson how to do pull-ups, or a grandmother working out with her friends on these enormous cardio machines. A lot of the film was planned, but then these incredible moments would happen that you could never have anticipated. 

Visually, though, I arrived with a very specific idea of how I wanted to make the film. Whenever you make a documentary or any visual or photographic work within a space that possesses that much power, you have to ask yourself: how do you actually represent power? What does strength look like? How do you translate it into images? I drew a lot of inspiration from Soviet-era cinema, but particularly from Stanley Kubrick. Obviously, almost any filmmaker will tell you that Kubrick was an influence, but I was interested in very specific aspects of his work: his use of Steadicam and the sense of intimacy it can create, but also the way it allows you to move through a space; the use of slow, powerful zooms; and then those enormous wide shots. 

Kachalka itself almost resembles an industrial wasteland, so I knew the scale of the environment had to become part of the film. I had a very clear visual approach in mind. I even assembled a kind of reference film from clips taken from other films to communicate what I wanted ‘Kachalka’ to become. I also had an extraordinary resource available to me. An Austrian photographer had made a photographic series about the gym a few years before we made the documentary, and the images were incredible. I remember drawing a great deal of inspiration from them.

My relationship with Ukraine continued long after ‘Kachalka.’ I’ve returned many times and later made another feature documentary there, ‘Sanatorium,’ which was filmed in Odessa and became Ireland’s submission to the Oscars last year. So I spent a great deal of time in the country, both before and during the war. The truth is that I had already recognised an extraordinary strength in Ukrainian people before the war. It is difficult to explain if you have never been to Ukraine or that part of the world, but people there are incredibly tough. Their history is a difficult one. This history of violence did not begin in 2022, or even in 2014; it stretches back across centuries, and I think that has shaped a certain toughness in people. 

That doesn’t mean they are cold. Ukrainians might sometimes appear that way when you first meet them, but once you get to know them, they are incredibly warm and beautiful people. So when I think about Kachalka today, there is a whole range of emotions. I believe the gym will continue to exist through all of this, even though I know fewer people are going there now. The saddest part is that many of the men you see in the film will no longer be in that gym. Some will have been drafted into the army; some have died. 

And ultimately, when you watch a film like ‘Kachalka,’ what you see is simply people enjoying a workout and spending time together. That is what people want. It is actually very simple: people want to have a good life. The reality is that there is a full-scale war getting in the way of that every single day. You only have to look at the news to understand that it has not stopped. At the same time, what gives me some sense of optimism is the strength of the Ukrainian spirit. You can see something of it in ‘Kachalka,’ and perhaps even more in my other film. That strength is pretty unmatched. So, yes, there is a whole range of emotions when I look back at the place. Recently, I also have noticed that since the war there seems to be much more grass growing around the gym, and apparently there are more animals wandering through it now.”

Your ‘Kachalka’ will be screened on San Servolo before the ONA audience. What feelings arise when you imagine your work taking shape in such a singular setting, surrounded by the Venetian Lagoon? And what would you ultimately like the ONA audience to carry with them after experiencing the film?

Gar O’Rourke: “First of all, I’m really honoured to have the film screened there. I would love to be there myself, have a glass of wine and enjoy it. But I also think there is a surprising parallel between Kachalka and the place where the film will be shown. San Servolo has lived through different histories. It was once used for military purposes, then became a hospital, and today it has been reimagined as a creative place: somewhere that can give energy to young creative people, filmmakers and others. 

For me, Kachalka represents something similar. It is a place that has also lived through different histories, until at some point a group of people came together and decided, ‘We’re going to build a gym.’ They didn’t really have the money to do it, so it became a community effort. Even the materials within the gym have been reimagined. They come from warehouses, factories, an army tank, even a submarine. People took all these disparate pieces and gave them an entirely new purpose. In that sense, I feel San Servolo is the perfect place to screen the film. 

As for what I hope people take away from ‘Kachalka,’ first and foremost, I hope it helps keep Ukraine in their consciousness. One of the problems when a war continues for such a long time is that, inevitably, people begin to turn their attention elsewhere. It’s a sad truth. So I’m incredibly grateful that this film is still being shown and that audiences are continuing to engage with it. I hope the Italian and international audience at ONA will also recognise that the people they see in the film are really no different from them. Ukrainians are the same as Italians; they’re the same as Irish people. They want to have a good life, enjoy themselves, be healthy and appreciate simple things. So I hope the audience laughs. I hope they feel something. And maybe I hope they leave wanting to get a little pump themselves and have a workout afterwards.”