Dear friends, we are proud that we successfully held the Festival online this year, but in 2022 we are looking forward to returning to the cinema halls because we missed you and our offline meetings. We have already started work and soon we will reveal the topic of the 19th Docudays UA Festival. May "offline" win in the year of the Tiger and see you after the holidays! 

Part of our team recalled 2021 during the final stream, but we have got so many thoughts, dreams, and stories that we decided to share them with a wider audience.

Dar’ya Averchenko, Нead of Communication Department:

"Last year's biggest challenge was to stuck in Groundhog Day. We could not even imagine that we would find out about the next quarantine again at a live press conference on the eve of the 18th Docudays UA opening? This time we foresaw this course of events and opened the festival on docuspace.org according to the planned schedule. However, this experience has shown that the festival-goer is a social being who misses live communication behind the bars of lockdown, refuses to eat, and dreams only of going out. So we have planned to hold the 19th Docudays UA in a hybrid format, with offline screenings, workshops, an exhibition, an industry programme, a camp for children, and online shows for those who will not be able to attend offline events. "Let everything come true," I will write on a piece of paper, burn it at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, sprinkle it in champagne, and drink. They say if you manage to do all this a minute before midnight the dream will come true."

Oleksandra Nabieva, Curator of the interdisciplinary programme DOCU/SYNTHESIS:

“Sealed 2021 has become a laboratory for experimentation and new formats. Amateur computer animation, a multimedia exhibition with a total installation in dialogue with cybernetics and popular science films. As well as a hybrid, photographic and VR-exhibition of Alexander Chekmenyov who travelled the country, questioning the stigma around mental health. As part of the DOCU/SYNTHESIS interdisciplinary programme launched this year, we also brought the conversation about the moving image into the field of art. Obvious, expressed and illusory connections have woven this year into something more valuable than one would expect from the pandemic reality."

Yevhen Antiukhin, Head of IT-Department:

"The idea that during quarantine it is even more important to continue showing documentaries than in previous years inspired me. Continue to watch what is happening in different parts of our planet, and in spite of everything, work on your critical thinking.

After a successful online festival in 2020, we saw the potential in DOCUSPACE. So we decided to prepare even better for 2021 and improved our online cinema, which now hosts hundreds of views every month." 

Ksenia Shymanska, Head of the Human Rights Department, shares her memories of one of the screenings within the Travelling Docudays UA, which she attended in the fall during Together for Safe Childbirth! campaign:

"At the screening of the film Unseen, with the participation of director Maia Martiniak in Kropyvnytskyi, one of the event participants asked, "Why should we, men, watch this film?" Of course, the invited speakers could answer this question. However, the need disappeared when the doctor present in the hall took the floor. He said, “We shape a request for changes in the medical system. All of us (and men too). If we do not talk about the need for change, the medical system will not change." We are working for the sake of these comments and people who become our agents of change!” 

Maria Sulialina, Project Manager at the Travelling Docudays UA:

“When I think of this year spent with Docudays UA, the first thing that comes to mind is the seminar for regional coordinators of Docudays UA and the strategic session in August. It was a very strange and joyful feeling at the same time: to get together offline after a lingering online reality. We all worked together to update the Strategy of the Travelling Festival and planned the Traveling Festival in 2021. But what inspires me the most now is that we are confidently following the plan we set out back then. This would be impossible without the team and our regional partners who held the Festival in the regions. " 

Iryna Sidorenko, Communications Manager for the Human Rights Department:

"We installed a gynecological chair in the Taras Shevchenko Park in Kyiv within the action before the start of Together for Safe Childbirth! campaign. At the end of the action, I had to wait for the loaders to help deliver the chair back to the maternity hospital. While I was waiting, I had to keep away from the chair the guys who wanted to sit on it. They mistook it for an art object, but I bore full responsibility for this chair and I was afraid that this "art object" would be broken."