Iryna fears for Crimea's next generation who have grown up in an atmosphere of violence and, she says, copy their fathers who have returned from Russia's war against Ukraine.
"I never got to come here until working on this script," Mr Coogler told a crowd of 1,500 on Thursday. "It blew my mind — I got to meet musicians, I got to meet community members. It really changed me just to come here and do the research."While some remnants of the town depicted in the film remain, like many towns in America, its storefronts have been emptied and modernised - though it still enjoys tourist interest for its history.
Odes to some of Clarksdale's blues legends, like Robert Johnson, are colourfully painted onto the sides of buildings, reminding people of the history of the streets where they walk.One of those streets used to be home to Delta Blues Alley Cafe, a blues joint owned by Jecorry Miller that burned to the ground last month.Mr Miller wants people to have a better understanding of the history that lives on the streets on Clarksdale and the movie is a way to grasp that.
"The movie itself is going to be great for the town - we get nine times the population of our city that comes to visit the city every year, now it could be ten or 11 times the population that visits Clarksdale," Mr Miller said. "People being here spending their dollars is a great thing for us."And local residents said the attention is all the more welcome because they see themselves and their culture in the film.
At the Thursday screening, longtime Clarksdale residents relished the details.
Ms Luckett, the Blues singer, was listening to make sure the characters' dialect sounded right. She watched to see if the land in the backdrop of the film was as flat and green as it is in real life.Crimea has been under occupation since Vladimir Putin annexed the peninsula in 2014, when Russia's war in Ukraine began.
Iryna decided to remain, also to care for an elderly relative but also because she did not want to leave "her beautiful home".All signs of Ukrainian identity have been banned in public, and Iryna says she cannot speak Ukrainian in public any more, "as you never know who can tell the authorities on you".
Children at nursery school in Crimea are told to sing the Russian anthem every morning, even the very youngest. All the teachers are Russian, most of them wives of soldiers who have moved in from Russia.Iryna occasionally puts on her traditional, embroidered