Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World
Written, edited, produced, and directed by Michael Fiore
Narrated by David Duchovny
107 min.
Unrated
In select theaters February 23

by Daniel Pecoraro, Staff Writer

From mid-March 2022 until May 2023 (when getting hit by a car but me in a couple months of PT), when my nonprofit management job went from fully remote to a one-day-a-week hybrid schedule, I made the (in retrospect, slightly bananas) choice to commute by bike, about eleven miles each way. The trip home took me on 2nd Avenue, and on that first trip back home on March 21, I was greeted at the corner of 9th Street and 2nd, just north of St. Mark’s Place and the home of STOMP, was a portrait of Volodymyr Zelenskyy screwed on a light pole, surrounded by his line declining a possible exile, “I need ammunition, not a ride.” And below it, a very long line of people who, not knowing what else to do to provide support, were there to eat borscht and varenyky (pierogi). That was Veselka in those early days of this current phase of the Russo-Ukrainian war, after the fighting went beyond Crimea and the Donbas and the shelling of Kyiv began. And the response of New Yorkers, both lifelong and recent arrivals, is the primary focus of Michael Fiore’s Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World. 

While the film starts in medias res, eleven days into the war in Veselka’s crowded basement kitchen, the film takes a broad look at Veselka’s place in the history of Little Ukraine (bounded by 14th Street, Avenue A, Houston Street, and the Bowery/3rd Avenue, working clockwise) and the East Village. The main protagonists are the owning family, the Birchards: Tom, who married Wolodymyr Darmochwal’s daughter Marta and (after Wolodymyr’s heart attack, the result of essentially working himself to death, in 1974) second-generation owner-operator, and his son Jason, who has worked at Veselka since he was thirteen years old and took over primary operations just before the Covid pandemic began. In various historical interludes, we see how they turned Veselka from a newsstand and candy store (eventually including a small lunch counter) to a full-fledged Ukrainian-American diner, one that by the early ‘90s (at Jason’s suggestion, and stewardship) joined Katz’s, Ratner’s, and Kiev as twenty-four-hour joints. Veselka survived amid the heroin epidemic, a short-lived round of construction of the 2nd Avenue subway, 9/11, and Sandy, with Tom and Jason telling Fiore how it happened. (The main answer: getting to sell some of the first Lotto tickets in the city, some good coffee, hiring Max Cholowsky as a short-order cook, and an ensuing positive review of the Village Voice to cap off its conversion from newsstand to restaurant.) Actor and Ukrainian American David Duchovny provides additional narration to help ground the story.

But even with the historic callbacks — Little Ukraine’s diminution from 60,000 immigrants to 25,000, the rise and fall of the downtown rock scene, Jason’s attempt to strike out on his own in Hawaii in the late ‘90s and his pre-Y2K return, and Tom’s short-lived Veselka Bowery, an attempt to take Eastern European fare upscale — the film operates essentially in the here-and-now, looking at the restaurant in 2021 through early 2023, from just before the war’s current stage to its one-year anniversary. As the restaurant rebounds from Covid (thanks in part to a bank of outdoor booths), handles a frenzy of national shipments of pierogi and soup, and plans another round of renovation and expansion, it’s up to Jason to keep his team mentally afloat as the war rages on and the horrifying images come back home. Veselka becomes a clearinghouse for the war relief effort, accepting donations from across the city and sending all the borscht proceeds to a Ukrainian humanitarian charity. 

And Jason becomes a lobbyist for keeping the city, state, and country behind the Ukrainian cause, following in the patriotic footsteps of his grandfather. Veselka hosts Eric Adams and the Ukrainian Consul-General for a meal, with Jason urging the mayor’s solidarity and for maintaining outdoor dining as cameras look on from the windows. (Adams’s mugging for cameras, almost certainly not listening as the Consul-General describes the shelling of Ukrainian cities, is a fascinating microcosm of the current mayor’s profound weirdness. His “when does the hard part start?” bit, which he repeated at multiple intervals throughout 2022 and 2023, is another.) Tom leads a bike tour of Manhattan in support of Ukrainian causes, starting at the restaurant and ending at the Ukrainian Festival two blocks away. And Jason, his first cousin Justin (VP of Development) and Vitalii (a server turned manager and now a director of operations) help represent Veselka at a US Open benefit exhibition and a charity series between the NYPD and Ukrainian national baseball teams at Coney Island. Fiore adeptly shows both the toll this all takes on the Birchards and their colleagues, and sheds light on the impact of their work.

Veselka counts thirty Ukrainian immigrants among the staff, and Fiore puts two of them (Vitalii and Dima, a line cook) in the spotlight. Vitalii’s thousand-yard stare is among the first shots of the film, and his and Dima’s slow opening to Fiore gives the film a needed evolutionary scope. With Jason’s support and sponsorship, Dima gets his mother and aunt out of Ukraine and to a job in Veselka’s kitchen. After months of debate and some processing time, Vitalii brings home his own mother, with the both of them living with Tom, his second wife, and their huge dogs in New Jersey. Those moments, when the family of Veselka is shown, and the impact the restaurant has had on lives — bringing them from the war front to safety, and to a ready-built support system — is deeply moving.

Some of the film doesn’t work; the rainbow motif (featuring some multicolored vortex effects to connect Wolodymyr to his grandson) is clunky, and a POV shot of serving a plate of varenyky comes off as a bit silly. But Fiore’s piece, punctuated by Ryan Shore’s score with saxophone solos by David Sanborn, is ultimately a quality work of filmic journalism and, to an extent, a bit of propaganda. Even though the film ends around the one-year mark of the war (with a brief postscript noting that Jason Birchard has helped raise another $300,000), I couldn’t help but peer beyond the film’s scope to now. I think of how quickly the level of US support has sagged, both in the halls of Congress and among the public. (The lines at Veselka have gotten a lot shorter, at least on the weekends.) 

And, thinking about the other side of the foreign aid bill currently in the House, I keep contrasting Jason Birchard to Philadelphia’s own Michael Solomonov in my mind. Both are restauranteurs who proudly represent their heritage, and I think both responded to wars affecting their respective cultures how they thought was best. (And personally, I find some of the criticism of Solomonov’s fundraising for medical supplies to be a bit overblown, though it might have been better served going to Doctors Without Borders instead of United Hatzalah.) But Jason’s focus was more humanitarian and cultural, while his staff took more of a lead in getting things like armor plating to the front. We see the Birchards host newly arrived refugees and the Ukrainian baseball team, but their efforts don’t extend to the equivalent of comping IDF reservists’ meals (at least in public view). It’s not Fiore’s job to square the circle of various international crises. But I think a sign that Veselka is an effective documentary is the mental wandering, days after seeing the film, to where we are now. 

Veselka is screening for one week at the Laemmle NoHo 7 in Los Angeles and the Village East by Angelika in New York. If you end up seeing a NYC screening at the Village East, a remnant of the Yiddish Rialto and then Little Ukraine, head two blocks down to Veselka, where my go-to is the deluxe vegetarian plate (with assorted varenyky, a vegetarian stuffed cabbage, kasha with mushroom gravy, and a cup of mushroom barley soup), and for dessert, perhaps a blintz or a chocolate egg cream.