Iron Butterflies 2023
This lesson in political revelation focuses on the shooting down of the Malaysian passenger jet MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014. A meticulous, investigative exposé that lays bare the mechanisms of Russian warfare.
This lesson in political revelation focuses on the shooting down of the Malaysian passenger jet MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014. A meticulous, investigative exposé that lays bare the mechanisms of Russian warfare.
The film tells the story of several volunteers, soldiers of the International Legion of the General Staff of the Unified Armed Forces, a unit called Ronin Team. During their service, the soldiers become true friends: they work, study and rest together. However, a time of trials for the courage and skills of the legionnaires comes. The hot summer months are not easy for them. And not all recruits can withstand the high pace of training and service. Meanwhile, troubling news of the Russian offensive comes from the front.
A summer’s day in a former German military barrack: children forced to flee Ukraine have found refuge here. In their games, they discover military symbols from the past and link them to their experiences.
The film’s events take place on a single day: August 24, 2022, the day Ukraine celebrates the 31st anniversary of the renewal of independent statehood. The film combines places and people that best capture the country’s wartime spirit. The locations are: the relatively safe cities of Kyiv and Lviv; the cities under daily missile fire of Kharkiv and Mykolaiv; a trench at the frontlines near Donetsk; and the beaches of Odesa. The film presents a day in the life of a beach police patrol, a woman anti-tank missile operator, a water delivery driver, a mortar unit soldier, a rapid assault unit soldier, a 14-year-old pub janitor, an artist and a former member of parliament. Together, these people and places create an engaging mosaic of a day in the life of Ukraine.
Roma was working in London when the Ukrainian conflict rapidly escalated with Russia’s army rolling across the border of his home. He decides to return to his family, whose town soon becomes a battlefield. While they take shelter in basements, cut off from the rest of their country, Roma joins an air intelligence unit, operating drones to locate the whereabouts of the invading force. As the drone flies, Roma is so close to his family, but in reality, the gulf between them is enormous.
After enduring horrors during the War in the Eastern part of Ukraine (2015), three young Ukrainian war veterans return home, both stronger than before and full of scars. They try to find out how to belong in this old but new reality and win their private wars, try to understand how to live civil life. But in February 2022 full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine started and they are faced with new challenges of reality. What experience do the heroes gain in these wars, and how are they initiated by accepting death?
In 2014 Russia’s hybrid war against Ukraine turns hot. An engineer, actor, soccer coach and florist volunteer to fight on the front line. Unaware of the pivotal role they will play in the war, they discover the meaning of true leadership.
Through its two parallel plotlines, the film follows the exploits of a volunteer evacuation team in the front lines of Eastern Ukraine, led by young, precociously stoic Anton, as well as the wartime daily lives and unlikely friendship of two elderly women - pragmatic Zinaida and dreamy, starry-eyed Taisia - who decided to stay at their homes in the now de-occupied Chernihiv region. While Anton faces the most visceral horrors of war on a daily basis during his team's urgent, desperate attempts to rescue the most vulnerable, who are often reluctant or unwilling to leave, Zinaida and Taisia seek to pursue any forms of resistance within their power - from praying and writing poetry to hiding historic plaque and reporting intelligence to the Ukrainian military.
The film is a story about the officers, soldiers and seamen who did not betray their oath of loyalty to the people of Ukraine and their first hand accounts about Russia's invasion and annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula. They continue to fulfill their military obligations on land, on sea and in the air today.
From the beginning of the siege of Azovstal by the Russians the director had conversations with soldiers of the Azov Regiment, revealing their portraits. This film is dedicated to Dmytro Kozatsky with the call sign "Orest". Orest is a former liaison officer and head of the Azov Regiment's press service in Mariupol. Orest has been covering the world situation in Mariupol and at Azovstal since the beginning of the Russian invasion, and was in captivity at the time of the film's release.
A young filmmaker Ihor finds a hidden and unpublished photo archive of his grandfather Leonid Burlaka, a famous Soviet cinematographer. Discovering a man that he never knew well enough through the damaged pictures, he gets closer to his dementing grandpa, facing the tension between memory and forgetting.
From the beginning of the siege of Azovstal by the Russians the director had conversations with soldiers of the Azov Regiment, revealing their portraits. This film is dedicated to Kirt. Kirt has been fighting in the Azov Regiment since 2014, was the commander of the Second Company of the Azov Regiment. Together with other soldiers he defended Azovstal.
From the beginning of the siege of Azovstal by the Russians the director had conversations with soldiers of the Azov Regiment, revealing their portraits. This film is dedicated to Bars - Deputy Commander of the Second Battalion of the Azov Regiment. Defending Azovstal Bars shares footage taken after the clashes with Russian troops and his thoughts.
Debut feature film project by Yuliia Hontaruk. A drama based on a true story that happened in 2015, at the beginning of the war in the east of Ukraine.
"Stronger than Arms", is the history that heats our hearts up with the memory of events and people, who from the time of Euromaidan to the war in the East were building a new Ukraine.
About the politically incorrect and patriotic adventures of four friends in a mysterious convent full of dangers. This time, to save Ukraine, the heroes plunge into the Russian sabotage Center. Kremlin agents are preparing a terrible crime against civilians. To win, your friends will have to get used to completely new, dangerous roles and come back from the dead several times.
Nikita taught clarinet, saxophone and conducting at the Chernihiv Music College. When the Russians started shelling his native Chernihiv, he stopped playing music and instead became a volunteer delivering targeted humanitarian aid. Volunteering and traditional Chinese tea drinking - helps him keep his psyche in balance. But is something capable of bringing music back into his life?
This is not a movie about strategic actions or the history of Donetsk airport defense. This is a film about the lives of Ukrainian guys who are ready to give everything for the sake of freedom and homeland.
This film plays out in Ukraine on a single day: March 14, 2022, the 2,944th day of the Russian-Ukrainian War. In the last few weeks, intense warfare has surreally mixed places and people and created a post-apocalyptic dimension revealing new qualities and roles. Thousands of Kyivans have moved to live in subway stations. The capital city's previously calm suburbs have been transformed into battle zones of destruction and looting by Russian occupiers. People no longer live according to "workdays" or "weekends," counting instead the number of days since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine... The film presents this day in the lives of a pop music star, video engineer, historian, art restorer, polar researcher, and pensioner, who were all forced to radically change their lives.
The capture of Mariupol by the Russian army was one of the tragic consequences of Russia's military aggression against Ukraine. A girl with the call sign "Nava", who worked in the press service of the Azov regiment and is in the besieged Azovstal by the invaders, reads her verse under documentary footage of evidence of the destruction of Mariupol by the Russians.