A Year Later

He and she are refugees from eastern Ukraine. Both of them are 24, just like their country. They have left home and now live in someone else’s flats. At night they watch the lives of others, and in the daytime they have to return to the life of their own. All they have is their memories and dreams.

Katya and Anton are a young couple who have just moved into their own apartment in a residential area of Kyiv. They are madly in love with each other, but their happiness and lives are suddenly threatened. There seems to be a real evil lurking behind the walls of the apartment, which is about to break out.

The lights go out. Three friends in the dark share memories of their love for cinema and seem to bid farewell—whether to one of their own leaving abroad or to their cinephile youth. After, they drift into a bohemian gathering at the old Master Klass House of Culture, then fade into a screen dawn. The revolution is over, emigration never came, the cinemas are closed. What remains are melancholy, escape, and memory.

Young couple are spending one of the last nights together. Their relationship is almost over. He is going to leave Ukraine and start work in Poland. She is on the way to her new life in Kyiv. They try to talk, but the communication breaks down. Everything they are left with is emptiness. In the middle of the night, someone knocks on their door. Again and again. When they come to the door, there's no one there. But the knocking continues.

Young couple travels to a small Ukrainian city Rovno. But instead of an adventure, ahead lie sickness, bad weather and five days of searching for beauty in a world where beauty is in short supply.

In 1890, in one of the villages of Ukrainian Polissia, a man died under mysterious circumstances. The locals blamed his wife, a young healer, and banished her from the village. When affliction came to the village, people believed they had been cursed by the castaway woman. They discovered she was living in the forest, found her and burned her alive as a witch. But before doing it, they sent a priest to have a final conversation with her.