Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hütz, ‘Scream of My Blood’ Filmmakers on Capturing Punk Band’s Story
variety.comNick Holdsworth Eugene Hütz, founder and frontman with U.S. gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello, would likely to have ended up a painter wearing “dirty pants and long hair” had his parents not left the Soviet Union when he was 16. “I would probably have become a painter, as there was more of a path paved in that in my family,” he says. “I was drawing most of my childhood and my uncle – Mikhail Mykolayev – is a pretty well-known painter who still lives in Kyiv.” Fresh from playing a brief, impromptu solo guitar gig at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, following the international premiere of a new documentary about the band, “Scream of My Blood: A Gogol Bordello Story,” Hütz fits the bill, although his khaki cargo pants are not paint spattered.
The singer was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, but the Hütz family left years of Communist oppression behind and moved to Western Europe in the dying days of the Soviet empire.
His father had always been a non-conformist – something which spelt trouble in the Soviet Union – and Eugene says that even at the age of nine, teachers had him down as a dangerously independent thinker.
But it was the meltdown at the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power station in 1986 that finally forced the decision to leave. By the time he was 17, after living as a refugee in several countries, the family had been granted U.S.
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