Vadym Ilkov

Bakhmut, a small city in East of Ukraine, becomes an example for the dichotomy between the Soviet past and the (western) future. The precarious, war-driven landscape and the dreams of financial stability dissolve in the remains of the leisure culture from the past. A short film about the decommunization processes in the East of Ukraine. It reflects how the changes of monuments and regimes affect human beings in their everyday life. Until it finds the culmination of cultural and political borders in one product: the Soviet Champagne. The precarious, war-driven landscape of East-Ukraine and the dreams of financial stability dissolve in the remains of the leisure culture from the past.

This film portrays a child's fantasy - naïve and absurd. A girl gets too excited while playing in her room and suddenly finds herself in a world made of paper and plasticine.

Before becoming an animator Anatolii Surma studied to be a tractor driver, and even worked in a regional road service office. His passion for animation began with The Simpsons and South Park. And while American TV series are generally created by huge studios, the distinctly recognizable characters that make up this whole absurdist world come from the hand of an amateur artist from a village in Khmelnytskyi oblast (province). Anatolii Surma never writes scripts for his cartoons. The ones he does write end up in the oven. This is a documentary about the author of the visual identity of Docudays UA Festival 2021 that reveals the secrets behind his creative process, the source of ideas and the inspiration for Anatolii Surma.

A series of odd coincidences has left Lukas, an interpreter for an OSCE military checkpoint inspection tour, stranded near a small southern Ukrainian steppe town. With nowhere to turn, this city boy finds shelter at the home of a colorful local named Vova. With Vova as his guide, Lukas is confronted by a universe beyond his imagination, one in which life seems utterly detached from any identifiable structure. Fascinated by his host and his host's daughter Marushka, with whom he is rapidly falling in love, Lukas’s contempt for provincial life slowly melts away and sets him on a quest for a happiness he had never known could exist.

The city of Mariupolis is by the Azov sea. It is also on the river Kalmius. Most of the city’s residents, half a million according to the last census, are working for the steel factory and do fishing, for leisure or food, in between shifts. The orthodox church towers above the city and its newly build bronze domes are sitting next to it, waiting to be donned. A tent near by is sheltering a crying icon, which receives a steady flow of visitors.

Tolik, an openly gay bohemian singer/artist in the Ukrainian underground scene, is raising his niece Katya, a stubborn little girl who has taken to calling him Dad. Her mother, Anya, is both at the heart of the film and almost doomed to the fringes, adrift between solitude and stays in a psychiatric hospital.

Seventeen-year-old Alina is in love with an imposing Frenchman. Suddenly, she loses her sense of humor. But not for long.

May 2014. Serhiy Zhadan, Oleksiy Vorsoba, Vlad Kreymmer, and Olha Mykhaylyuk have gathered in Mstsyhovsky’s estate (Seleznivka village), near the town of Alchevsk, to work on the musical and literary production entitled ‘Punctuation’. Everything is going on in waltz time.