Waking Up in Silence 2023
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
Personal videos from the phones, camcorders, cameras and GoPros of Ukrainian soldiers are woven into a surreal journey to the frontline of the war with Russia. The film shows a bizarre world whose laws are quite different from what we are used to. The behaviour is different, the relationships unfold differently and the humour takes on different notes. The heroes wake up and fall asleep, rejoice and cry, always feeling that the recording may end at any moment.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
The artists Zhanna Kadyrova and Denys Ruban spent two weeks in the basement of their house, fleeing from the rocket attacks and sabotage groups of the occupiers that were flooding the outskirts of Kyiv at the time, and then decided to evacuate to western Ukraine. Local residents of one of the Zakarpattia villages sheltered them in a picturesque house on a hillside, next to a river. Doing what you know and love for the benefit of Ukraine is the best thing an artist can do in times of war. This is how the Palianytsia project was born - a series of objects made of stones cut by a mountain river. Zhanna sells them to patrons and galleries and uses the proceeds to buy bulletproof vests, radios, thermal imagers and other things our soldiers need. Before she sends her ‘loaves’ to Venice for the Biennale, Zhanna holds an exhibition in the village where she now lives, so that the people who have taken her in can be the first to see her art.
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.
The Ukrainian Revolution (2013-2014) and the war with Russia in the Donbas are nearing. The film deals with the history of the First Company of the Maidan, which defeated the enemy within and advanced to the frontlines to fight the external enemy. Immersion in the epicentre of events, a frank artistic and civilian view of human relationships against the background of violent social upheaval. Immutable human stories, the collision of charismatic characters, challenges and solutions on the verge of life and death, the search for interaction, the first steps towards the formation of civil society - All of this is summed up by an understanding of the way already travelled and an optimistic view of Ukraine's future.
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?
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 is a film about the people and a city lost in time and space. It's about the speed at which life can change and about things that remain constant no matter what. The film is based on the events that occurred after the shelling of the district of Skhidniy in the city of Mariupol on January 24, 2015. Shelling was carried our by pro-Russian militants from "GRAD" multiple launch rocket systems.
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.
Oleh "Simon" Krisenko is a guy from Mykolaiv who went to war in 2014. In civilian life, he was an actor and played in a children's theater. In 2014, when the war started, he immediately joined a volunteer battalion. We filmed Simon during his service in the regiment in 2015, 2016, and 2017. Together with other defenders of Mariupol, he ended up at Azovstal and then in captivity. In May 2023, Simon returned home after a year in Russian captivity. He is currently undergoing rehabilitation. He is actively involved in campaigns and support for the families of prisoners and wounded.
Between the Frames is the story of an exceptional relationship between a teacher and a young generation of actors brought up in his creative workshop. Five years after graduation from university, the main characters return to see themselves from the side and try to catch what is happening between the frames. The story is told by ex-students while they are watching behind-the-scenes archives of their student performance The Cabaret and reflecting upon the years that have passed. In the center of the story stands a teacher as a life-turning figure for each of the characters.