Kharkiv: Capital of Alternative Photography

Filmed during one night in July 2025 by forty filmmakers and hundreds of citizens, The Illusion of a Quiet Night paints a vast collective portrait of war-torn Ukraine. Between fear and exhaustion, moments of joy and scenes of the ordinary day to day, we watch as life goes on in spite of everything, witnessing the resilience of a nation gripped by uncertainty.

An essay-style account of the war from the perspective of three generations of women - those of the director, her mother, and that of her grandmother. Originally from Donetsk - an industrial city in eastern Ukraine - the family was uprooted in 2014 when the Russian war against Ukraine first commenced. By 2022, the same enemy once again began knocking on the door of their new home -which was now in Kyiv- and once again destroyed everything that the family had worked so hard to rebuild. Thrown into the limbo of exile, the director (she is also the narrator of the film) dives into a kaleidoscope of memories and chronicles both her personal and collective familial search for something to hold on to amid these turbulent times.

The story of Moldovan migrant worker Damian, navigating the postmodern world in foreign country, within the walls of a German warehouse, where an artificial mind named “Lydia” guides his every move.