Exarch

How far can you go on the way to your dream? Zhenia and Maks stopped going to the office and took up music seriously. Their band is called Reve ta Stohne. The guys do growl singing and dream of becoming real rock stars. However, for a start they need a music video and a studio album. And most of all they need money to pay for them. In search of income, Reve ta Stohne travels to the West.

The municipal district heating company from Ivano-Frankivsk has a cultural offer for its employees. To break away from their daily routine, run-down infrastructure and troublesome clients, they may come to sing in the company choir once a week. The folk and patriotic songs they practice at rehearsals become a bridge between the past communist era and the new political and economic reality. They help them to deal with the shock of transformation and simply spend some time together, just like in the good old times.

Mom feeds little birds from the window of a panel building in Mariupol, Ukraine, and grows quince in her dacha garden near the battle line. Telling about her simple life, the woman shoots videos for her daughter, who lives in Kyiv and often doesn't pick up the phone.

A married couple of artists is creating a mosaic on the wall of a cultural space in Kyiv. They work in the upcycling technique, drawing inspiration from Kyiv's mosaics made during Soviet times.

Kyiv in 2022. A car races at breakneck speed through the city at dawn. Filmed from a subjective camera angle in a single unedited shot, this remale of Claude Lelouch's "C'était un rendez-vous" captures the emotions in a state of emergency caused by the war.

This is a documentary story of love, a story about the long-distance relationship that started in September 2014, while war in Ukraine and the economic crisis in Greece were taking a dramatic turn.

Life flows in its everyday reality, but then suddenly something elusive changes its course. All that is left is the chance to plunge into memories where everything is preserved, as if in a museum.

The Petrivka book market is a place where everyone brings their old books they no longer need. The market sellers are people of the old school who still perceive books as a sort of currency.

Mariupol is an industrial city on Azov sea. I went there as a young sailor 20 years ago. The places alive in my memory are mostly destroyed. The battle-line of the Russian-Ukrainian war is just nearby the city. In the night I can hear the bombing. However, I am looking for the miracle there.

Metro is a factory of rush for the passengers. Thousands, who do not hurry to break the circulation schedule, work to create the rhythm. What does the escalator controller think of, sitting inside her booth during the rush hour? How do the cashiers see us through the window of their own, separate world, decorated with flowerpots? What a metro worker in the small room with found items loses?

When Brovary village officially became a town, one third of its residents were communist. After 60 years and three revolutions such proportion didn’t change: thirty percent of its streets keep the names of the former empire.

The main exposition of the museum in Avdiivka was dedicated to the Caucasus. In 2015, exposition was partly destroyed due to a Russian projectile. But now in Avdiivka there is again a people's museum - a place where the most wonderful ideas come to life.

Kramatorsk may not be the nicest place - a town of factories and broken infrastructure - but its denizens find much to love there, reflecting on their home with frankness and warmth.

At some point, one has to move out. A man decided to take care of his new house in advance.

This documentary about the Zhovten Cinema in Kyiv, which was constructed in 1931 and is one of the city's oldest, tells about how such spaces can function as cultural gathering points and the heritage of a country. The Zhovten Cinema in Kyiv is a unique opportunity to understand how a cinema can symbolize cultural resistance and identity. Zhovten (the name means October) becomes a cultural beacon and refuge, where the film becomes a bridge between past and present and local and global perspectives.

The typical living blocks – Troyeshchyna in Kyiv. The neighborhood’s biggest pulsing arteries, Tsvetayeva and Mayakovsky Streets, were constructed almost simultaneously several years before the Soviet Union collapse. The combination of archival footage and today’s shootings brings up the almost 100 years of history – from right after the revolution, in 1918, when Mayakovsky starts to make films, until the modern day. Or in the intersection on the two streets there is a story of the masses whose poet Mayakovsky was; the masses who ousted Tsvetayeva from their concrete towers. In any case, it a magic of the closest things that the pedestrians wouldn’t pay attention to.