Anna Palenchuk

A Polish vehicle traverses the roads of Ukraine. On board, people are evacuated following the Russian invasion. This van becomes a fragile and transitory refuge, a zone of confidences and confessions of exiles who have only one objective, to escape the war.

Vitaly Mansky’s intimate and insightful new documentary finds him crisscrossing Ukraine in the wake of the Maidan uprising, which has left his relatives scattered on both sides of a highly charged and dizzyingly complex political situation.

Askania-Nova is the largest steppe wildlife sanctuary in Europe. It is located in south part of Ukraine, not far from Crimea peninsula. In order to underline this unique beauty we created a documentary musical film about life of animals and people in wildlife sanctuary of Askania-Nova. The movie reveals stories of a three protagonists, whose destinies were entangled because of wildlife sanctuary.

When Zhorik moves to Kyiv, he has high hopes to improve his life. But then he encounters the mundane struggles, bureaucracy, and corruption of Ukrainian reality.

When Ruslana floods her Munich flat, Vladan, a former Boxer from Serbia, comes to her rescue. It is the night when Ruslana's son Bogdan should finally come from Kyiv. He rather falls in love with the spoiled pop-starlet Maria, for whom he is working. Both, however, are depending on Maria's rich patron Jora. The same night in Belgrade Vladan's son Zoran meets Jelena. But she intends to leave her homeland the next day, forever. Three cities. Three Love-Stories. One night in Europe.

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.

'Eurokryvbas' explores the rise of Ukrainian cities like Dnipro, Kryvyi Rih, and Kamianske, shaped by British, Belgian, Polish, German, and French investors during the 19th-20th centuries. Soviet policy erased their European origins. Today, experts and local activists are working to preserve this heritage amid Russia's ongoing war for these lands.

It's the late 1980s and the once seemingly undying Soviet Union is beginning to show signs of collapse, leaving thousands of members of the Ukrainian diaspora in the US and Canada with a chance of returning to the home they have always dreamed of living in. Afraid for their lives, but fueled by patriotism, thousands of them venture to Europe in order to provide the support to their friends relatives and their countrymen through times of crisis and violent protests, culminating in the last 99 days of the USSR and the birth of an independant Ukrainian nation.

What stands behind the Black Square, painted in 1915 by the obsessive artist Kazymyr Malevych? For his competitors, a fraud, for the Soviet regime, a secret code, for one woman, a love letter, for the people of Ukraine – a prophecy…

Ten figures walk around in a circle. All they have is a number. The “Great Zero” monitors them. Based on a dystopian parable by Oleg Sentsov, this film was created between Kyiv and the Siberian penal colony where Sentsov spent five years as a political prisoner.

Throughout time, Eastern Ukraine (such as Donbas) has been referred to as a 'Russian world', but this is indeed not the case. The history of Donbas was re-written during the Soviet era. Although the Soviet Union edited out and withheld all references to the European background of this region from history books in schools and universities. There were, in fact, numerous French, Belgian, German, British, Polish, Swiss, Dutch, and even American settlements and more than 100 wide-scale enterprises in the region. Therefore, this film reveals the pro-European industrialization of Ukrainian Donbas at the turn of the 19th century. It aims to emphasize the European roots of Ukraine long before the official integration process of Ukraine into the EU in 2022.