Against the Sun

Maria, aged 82, and her sick son Sashko live out their days in a remote province. Sashko went blind because of serious illness. He’s afraid that his mother is dying, but Maria desperately clings to life as she realizes that no one will take care of her son. They may seem to be acting irrationally, but they are heroically unwilling to surrender. Maria buys a calf, Sashko starts to build a tractor, groping his way in the darkness…

Deaf-mute Sergey enters a specialized boarding school for the deaf. In navigating through the school's hierarchy, he encounters a corrupt underbelly of criminality, known as The Tribe. By participating in several robberies, he gets propelled higher into the organization, when he meets one of the Chief’s concubines Anya, and unwittingly breaks all the unwritten rules of the group."

A soldier suffering from PTSD befriends a young volunteer hoping to restore peaceful energy to a war-torn society.

The film centers on Ukrainian surgeon Serhiy, who is captured by the Russian military forces in the conflict zone in Eastern Ukraine, and while in captivity, he is exposed to horrifying scenes of humiliation, violence and indifference toward human life. After his release, he returns to his comfortable middle-class apartment and tries to find a purpose in life by rebuilding his relationship with his daughter and ex-wife. He learns how to be a human being again, how to be a father and help his daughter, who needs his love and support.

Loneliness dwells in a big city; Kostya, the wedding photographer, dwells there too. At work, he is surrounded by happy people celebrating special moments in their lives. Kostya is about to turn 50, and he is drastically losing everything he used to cherish. Will he cope with his despair and regain the joy of life?

Forty years old is a perfect age to change ones life. The hero makes a decision to quit the psychotherapist's cabinet, which he is sick and tired of and become a poet. To become a freelance artist. A trifle remained to cope with to persuade the wife.

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.

The beginning of 1945, Poland. In a newly liberated country, the Communist Security Service is annihilating its enemies under the guise of punishing "national traitors." They organize a labor camp for Germans, Silesians and Poles, on the site of a former Nazi concentration camp called Zgoda / Reconciliation. Franek, who is in love with the Polish prisoner Anna, goes to work as a warder in the camp to save her. He does not know that one of the prisoners - Erwin, his German friend, also loved this girl for a long time. Franek joins the communists in the illusory hope of outsmarting the system.

Professional weightlifter Petro is preparing for an important competition. But before the competition, he receives tragic news that forces him to make a difficult decision. Petro's inner conflict makes him into more than just a mechanical bundle of muscles.

Ukraine. The time of the military Russian invasion. Two Ukrainian soldiers are doing the "routine" work of transporting the bodies of the dead.

A dystopian story set in post-war Ukraine, where a frustrated film director struggles to make the most of his life after being denied the opportunity to pursue his movie-making career. Estranged from his wife and daughter, who have been living in Vienna and are reluctant to return to their war-torn nation, the director tries to find solace in his conviction that the difficult times will pass and life will return to normal.

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.

Christmas Lviv. Cellist Orest is entangled in a chain of personal, domestic and work problems. And at some point it reaches the boiling point.

At the age of 16, Maria is in despair after the death of her mother as her life turns into hell. But she has to deal with the new circumstances. Every day turns into a trial. She is being isolated in a small apartment in one of Kyiv’s Residential districts, constantly suffering from sexual abuse. Being forced into this situation yet again, Maria decides on a desperate deed to put an end to years of violence from which she has suffered.

A slice of life in the director's native village in the Zhytomyr region.