What’s in a Name, Ukrainian Roots & Other Flowers
Until I got married, all my life I was known as Maria Rose Doctor. But as a child, by the time I got my own room to decorate, sunflowers became my forever favorite flower. I even had a sunflower mural on one of my walls. After all, I was the namesake of our late Grandma Maria from Ukraine, a country known for its sunflowers. And, although I was also named after Maria from West Side Story (a derivative of Romeo & Juliet), I represented our Grandma Maria’s legacy proudly—what little I understood of it…
An American Filmmaker’s Tribute to Her Late Ukrainian Grandmother
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet…”
What’s in a Name
Until I got married, all my life I was known as Maria Rose Doctor. But as a child, by the time I got my own room to decorate, sunflowers became my forever favorite flower. I even had a sunflower mural on one of my walls. After all, I was the namesake of our late Grandma Maria from Ukraine, a country known for its sunflowers. And, although I was also named after Maria from West Side Story (a derivative of Romeo & Juliet), I represented our Grandma Maria’s legacy proudly—what little I understood of it.
Did you know?
The Ukrainian flag represents “the sky above and the endless fields of wheat beneath it.“
Ukrainian Roots
Grandma Maria Doctor, born Maria Liser in Pervomaisk, Ukraine*, didn’t know much English when she arrived in the U.S.—after having a child in post-World War II England with a U.S. soldier. That is, after working from the age of 16 in a German forced labor camp during World War II.** Although my dad and his sisters don’t know the exact circumstances of how she ended up in such a camp and what other tragedies befell her family during the war, she never saw her family again. Only 4 or 5 letters seemed to have gotten to her mother before Maria died.
One thing was evident through it all: Grandma Maria, like her native sunflower, was a survivor. And she was able to find joy, overcome various heartbreaks, and make our grandpa happy. With him having struggled with a stutter (which onset, he later shared, due to being forced to use his right hand instead of his natural left), her language limitations were anything but a hindrance to their falling in love. They had four children together (my dad and his three sisters). Unfortunately, on February 3, 1963 at a birthday dinner in her honor, while carrying a platter of chicken to the basement, Grandma Maria’s heel broke, and she fell. She died four days later. Just like that, my dad and his sisters were left without a mom, and our grandpa without a wife.
But what about Maria? After all she had been through, why her? When then? And why is it we still haven’t found our long lost relatives in Ukraine? This was once a dream of our family’s, certainly mine anyway. A dream perhaps born of the brute trauma of that event—and wanting to make sense of the shadow it left over our family history.
Eleven years later our grandpa remarried, to Delorah, a single mom who read – and was deeply moved by – Maria’s obituary years earlier. Grandma Doctor, as we called her, eventually convinced my parents to name their second daughter after Grandma Maria, to honor her memory and legacy somehow. But what was her legacy exactly, besides being a war camp survivor, Ukrainian immigrant, and mother of four? Over time, one thing became clear to my mom and I: we needed to uncover her story, tell it, and if possible one day, make it into a movie…
Grandma Maria’s last photo
Fort Wayne, Indiana (1963)
Other Flowers
At some point when I was at USC (University of Southern California), I also developed a dream of having a film production company.
A brief aside: Watching Apollo 13, based on the infamous true story, was a big reason why I decided I wanted to be a filmmaker. And later, learning its director Ron Howard (who I originally knew as “Opey”) attended USC’s School of Cinema-Television, influenced me to apply to – and only to – USC. It may sound cliche, but the story of how I got into USC, and how I then got into film school there as a Production major in my sophomore year, makes this dream all the more of a reach. (More on that another day.)
I didn’t know entirely what that film production company would entail, but it was inspired by the desire to tell true stories—like my grandparents’. Real stories that didn’t shy away from the hard things in life, but somehow, some way, found meaning through them, and when possible, fostered peace (on many levels). This passion opened doors for me at USC, but it also led to some hard lessons. Wasn’t being a good storyteller and artist enough to open doors for me to live my dreams? Wasn’t telling stories for the greater good a worthy cause? I had little idea, amidst the recession of 2008/2009, of how to bridge the gap to my reality. Thus began my slow descent through wearing many hats in and outside the entertainment industry, exhausting myself to a great low, and finally landing at a place “where dreams were made”: Creative Artists Agency (CAA).
Don’t get me wrong. There were wonderful people at CAA. And I will always always be grateful for my job there in Client Trust Accounting—a job more important than I initially realized. But I still had this dream, and desire to make a bigger impact. I took every opportunity to pitch to CAA clients in their “Creative Lunches”, open to agent assistants and associates like me. In preparation for one of those opportunities, I recall a superior at CAA, in a position to have opened a door (if I had earned it), taking a shot at my dream of wanting to build a production company that adapted true stories for the big screen.
I understand now, with his experience, why he thought that business structure was a long shot. With all the memoirs and biographies being adapted at major production companies and studios, it wasn’t necessarily the smartest way to get my foot in the door in Hollywood. (Apparently, working at a top talent agency at the time—outside of working on an agent’s desk, didn’t exactly qualify me as having my foot in the door. Although maybe a toe…) He wasn’t the only one to discourage me or not take me seriously. But whether those who cast doubt did so from cynicism or wisdom, it was my choice whether to let that dream—a dream I felt God had given me–die.
The thing is though, looking back, maybe it did need to die in a way. Maybe building it by myself, to earn the recognition – the “flowers” – from the outside, needed to end before the purest form of the dream could really come to life, and thrive.
A symbol of hope & of peace
Throughout Ukraine’s history, sunflowers have served as a symbol of peace. (TIME, February 2022)
A Vision, Purpose & Looking Ahead
By the time I started building a beta Fields of Plenty Pictures website (years ago), I had a vision for a cinematic opening title sequence, flying over a sunflower field. And then reality hit, on July 17, 2014, when a Russian missile took out Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Eastern Ukraine. And just like that, 298 passengers and crew, including 80 children, perished—their lives cut terribly short. Out of this tragedy, I was pointed back to my roots, and our opening title sequence idea expanded…
Imagine: a plane tragically crashes over Ukraine and falls into a barren field. But in that plane, carrying nearly 300 precious souls, there was a packet of sunflower seeds that did not perish in the flames from the crash, but birthed new life.*** Representing all the stories of the lives lost in that crash now stands a field of sunflowers. One flower for every person’s story, and even more for the lives they touched. This vision was like guidance, as to what I was supposed to do with Fields of Plenty—and now what Asher and I feel compelled to do together. From tragedy, loss, and grief, tell stories that have a healing, inspirational impact of some kind.
Fields of Plenty, the name, has to do with faith and abundance as well…faith, or if you prefer belief, that can fuel the process of developing your story from a seed of an idea all the way to exhibition–sharing it with your chosen audience, be it your family, community, or the world. With a belief this is an abundant universe with space enough for all of our stories to be heard, seen, and matter in some way.
Today, we’re not a fully funded production company. (Although we’re working on that.) We don’t have an overall deal with a studio or network. But nor are we chained to such a contract. We are purely on a mission – we feel a “mission from God” – to tell stories that inspire healing, hope, and purpose amidst pain.
As you will also see in our next blog from Asher, about his family’s story, and the short film he created from it, we both come from families who experienced tragedy and compounded grief early on. (My mom also lost her dad when she was a young child, like my dad his mom, like Asher’s mom lost her dad…and more.)
We don’t always know why these things happen. And we’re not here to dismiss your own stories of trauma and loss, feelings of grief, and doubts or other struggles you’ve had as a result. However, we intend and pray that the work we do here, capturing true stories, adapting some, and inventing others (based on the truth of life) will foster (again) that healing, hope, and purpose we have found amidst the pain of life…
And we hope, especially if you feel called, that you will find a place here in our growing community. And take the challenge to tell your story. For your healing, for your family or friends, and you never know, for someone out there who needs a seed of faith, a glimmer of hope, they find in the story you know in your gut you have to tell.
*Pervomaisk, Ukraine: “In June 1996, to celebrate Ukraine giving up nuclear weapons, U.S., Russian and Ukrainian defense ministers planted sunflowers in a ceremony at southern Ukraine’s Pervomaysk missile base.” - TIME (March 4, 2022)
**Not quite the same as the Jewish side of our mom’s family, who had German-born relatives suffer and be murdered in Nazi concentration camps…but still oppressive. As it happens though, one third of the population of Pervomaisk before the German-Romanian occupation was Jewish, and most of them were killed during that time. - Wikipedia
***I only just learned of the Ukrainian woman in Henychesk on the first day of Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine (February 24, 2022) trying to give sunflower seeds to Russian soldiers—with instructions to put the seeds in their pockets ‘so the flowers will grow where they die.’- TIME / @Ukraine_World