Homecoming

The elite Kyiv Naval Political College operates in a city without access to the sea. The first Soviet aircraft carrier, the Kyiv, became the flagship of the Northern Fleet. The school's students, future political officers of the Soviet navy, go on a long navigation voyage; meanwhile, at their alma mater the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy opens. Focusing on the history of the institution's changing ideological functions, Under the Sign of Anchor explores the complex and sometimes paradoxical connections between war and culture, the Soviet past and the present. The film is based on materials from film archives from the time of the collapse of the USSR and the first years of Ukraine's independence.

Every year, thousands of Ukrainian Christians undertake a pilgrimage to Zarvanytsia, a sacred place. Between prayers they share news, brag about their wealth, take pictures of chapels, give interviews, witness miracles. Witness miracles?

Lena and Vitya, both in their early 20s, are two kids who now have a kid of their own. In the postnatal hospital room, like in limbo, their first team project is to wake their son for a feed. As the new parents repeatedly fail, they have to deal with the irreversible changes in their lives and with each other. Meanwhile, the diaper cake silently sits in the room, like a time bomb.

The stuff and visitors of one of the state institutions going through their daily routine. This buildings is full of mystery and secrets. Nobody can understand the issues they are trying to solve or to find the final destination of their corridor marathons. We can only trust and wonder how everything is organized here.

The documentary short depicts modern Kolomyia, where the cult of Austria-Hungary coexists with the post-Soviet reality: the developer hires a team of builders who, with thrift, brick by brick, dismantle old and uninhabitable real estate. Meanwhile, the artists invite fifteen-year-old Maksym to draw a walking route in Kolomyia: through the guide’s narration, the map of the city is transformed into a multi-layered historical palimpsest, where Soviet names are mixed with modern urban folklore and traditional Western Ukrainian piety, and “dog paths” are manifested by official intonation.

Valentina works in Lichtenstein. She lived in Kyiv until the age of 13. In 1996, during a hard transitive economic period in Ukraine, Valentina emigrated to Switzerland with her mother and stepfather. 20 years have passed.

During the political crisis in the Ukraine, young parents are going through a tough divorce. The mother wishes to emigrate with her child, but the father can't imagine living without his son.

Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei work with staged images that show their own bodies in the landscape of the Carpathian Mountains. Lying still in unnatural positions, dressed in trekking clothes, they seem to ask us: who is depicted on the screen?

While cruising through the nocturnal streets of Kyiv, Anna, a woman who stops and films passing men, unexpectedly encounters a soldier. They start to discuss the men she observed.

Looted by Russian occupational forces between 24 and 26 October 2022, the Kherson Museum of Local Lore used to house Southern Ukraine's largest and oldest collections of antiquities. The museum featured more than 173000 objects, spanning seven thousand years, from Scythian gold to World War II weaponry. Two weeks before Kherson was liberated by the Ukrainians, Russian occupational forces enacted a strategic theft, stripping centuries of Ukrainian history from the museum/region. The sound of shellings and missile strikes was recorded during filming inside the museum on December 12, less than two kilometers away from russian-occupied territory.

The film, adapted from a script by Kyiv playwright Oleksandr Steshenko, who has Down syndrome, critiques society’s norms through the lens of Ukrainian and Russian family dramas. Steshenko, active with Kyiv’s Parostky Theatre, uses TV drama conventions in his play to expose societal dysfunction. The film retains Steshenko’s unique language and employs soap opera aesthetics, including local TV stars, to convey estrangement, portraying society as a chaotic conflict.

The short film is based on events surrounding a 1977 mining accident in the Donbas region that ultimately led to the mine’s closure. In the film, locals, artists, and curators traverse the surface, paralleling one of the underground routes of the Novator mine. The procession ends at the monument to the dead miners, which is located just above the site of the underground accident that led to the death of the workers. Participants walk across the postindustrial landscape of Donbas, over the plowed fields, by bushes and courtyards, connecting the ground and the underground spaces through the choreography of their bodies.

Camera observes the biggest rave in Ukraine called Cxema and leads us from the image of a crowd to intimate experience of each dancer.

A short meditation on youth and history shot in Kyiv.

Kyiv’s Youth Leaving a Grocery Store is an homage to the Lumiere brothers’ classic “Workers leaving the Lumiere Factory”. Reconsidering the world’s first cinematic works, the artists address the redefining of labor and change of socio-economic formation. Thus, a producing factory turns into a consuming factory, and leisure turns into exhausting toil on the dance floor.