Khrystyna Savchuk

Maternité is a film about the fatigue of a mother of two small kids. The act of self-sacrifice for the sake of a child that absorbs all the time and leaves no space neither for consumption, nor for satisfactions or vanity, becomes a chance for a devoted woman in a state of the physical and emotional exhaustion to reach the transcendental state close to spiritual ecstasy. Lacking resources for a proper functioning, her organism starts disassociating information and enters into a seeming madness, when the brain is unable to control thought process as usual, and because of a total focus solely on a child, all the rest in the world ceases to be of any importance, freeing her from everything excessive and superfluous.

Searching for the real in the world of the virtual, motivated by an urge to exteriorize the feeling of loss and grief. 3D reconstruction of the kitchen of the film author's grandparents, where they had dinner together every Sunday and talked about death.

A film and a 3-screen installation about a woman who manages to maintain her integrity by avoiding the paradigms imposed by the social conditions of existence, focusing instead on the world beyond material dimension with its many limitations. Continual ritual gestures that do not involve obtaining a profit and an irrational faith in an unattainable have become the main basis of the film in which the prosaic reality is not expressed explicitly but through the visual poetry of a town in decay.

The film is about the constraints faced by two women who are unable to release their repressed essence. Overcoming the uneasiness of communicating with a reserved and self-controlled woman, the main heroine is eager to share the intimate experience with her, ultimately coming to terms with one’s identity.

Cities in transformation: architecture, subway plans, telephone lines, tracks, squares, crossed by shadows. Two lovers attempt to reach each others through walls. Lines of poetry written on naked bodies. Post-rock. Highway lights in the dark.