Hey there.
My name is Valerii Ege Deshevykh, a Ukrainian creative director who has spent his life in Turkey. Since 2014, I have been writing about cinema and providing social media services to small and medium-sized businesses. However, the words I want to be known for are far different from those in this paragraph.
In 2009, after I began studying film history, I was so deeply influenced by what I saw that I decided to delve further into the depths of cinema. As I analyzed cinema in depth, I realized that cinema and real history are intricately interconnected. To truly understand cinema and the films of a particular era, I needed to understand the history of that time. Without knowledge of World War II, I couldn’t grasp Italian Neorealism. Without understanding the Cold War, I couldn’t make sense of Hollywood’s low-budget space films. This realization led me to explore world history in detail as well.
While watching films and investigating history, I came to understand that the word nostalgia is a dangerous one—often used to gloss over the crimes of the past. History, as portrayed in films and in reality, is filled with horrifying periods and the dreadful people who inflicted them upon others. While I love films deeply, I cannot say the same about the stories they sometimes tell. The world is full of wicked people and, worse, dangerous individuals who yearn for a return to those dark days. Just as cinema was once manipulated for their malicious purposes, today’s media is being weaponized to wage war against the increasingly liberated world we live in.
As much as I adore cinema, I would choose a free world over it any day. This is precisely why I have decided to share what I’ve learned from history and from my encounters with ill-intentioned people I have worked with in my professional life. These days, I split my efforts between two channels. Through Reverse Odyssey, I explore film history and its reflections on real life, while Grifter Business focuses on media literacy education.