The concept of this year’s Docudays UA declares: “The image of the future is what we should imagine and implement right now.” However, it’s impossible to create an image of the future without remembering the past. This year’s DOCU/UKRAINE national competition undertakes to help us with this task.

Most of the five films in the programme are about the very recent past which, however, became a starting point for the new reality—about the beginning and the first year of the full-scale invasion. The occupation of Mariupol, the life of refugees in Uzhgorod, the first Independence Day in the state of full-scale war. Films by Mstyslav Chernov, Dmytro Hreshko and Volodymyr Tychyy each document war situations in their own way. It is horrible, but we seem to have already started to forget many of the things they captured. New things are happening, and these events stop being part of our daily reality. Or maybe we consciously push away the memory of these most horrible days and months as far as possible because that is just easier?

20 Days in Mariupol by Mstyslav Chernov is a document of war, harsh, direct, and painful. Scenes which were dangerous to film, but it seems that the author and his colleague, photographer Yevhen Maloletka, found it impossible not to film them. Scenes which affected the course of the war but did not change it. Scenes that we have inherited as a memory, as evidence for future trials, as a monument to all the people who have died in Mariupol.

King Lear: How We Looked for Love During the War by Dmytro Hreshko tells the story of internally displaced people who ended up in Uzhgorod and staged a Shakespeare tragedy under the leadership of a local director. The filmmaker observes this art therapy experiment step by step, from the idea to the happy ending: the successful premiere of King Lear. In this slow-paced narrative, it is interesting to watch the transformation of the refugees who, due to a coincidence of tragic circumstances, are rediscovering themselves. To watch the emotional changes among local residents, including the stage director, who suddenly sees an opportunity amid the chaos of war to realise his old dream.

In his new film Ukrainian Independence, Volodymyr Tykhyy once again uses the method of building a narrative limited to a single day, as he has done before in his previous films One Day in Ukraine. Ukrainian Independence is one day of a nation that, like a puzzle, is composed of the different realities of strangers from different corners of the country. Military, civilians, endless air raid warnings, holiday cake, burned enemy military vehicles on the Maidan, and an expressive writing on the wall of a destroyed house: “Time hears us.”

Iron Butterfliesby Roman Liubyi is about the circumstances of the downing of the MH17 flight. The film combines archive footage, performance, documentary observations to dissect the rhetoric of the Russian propaganda and to reveal the instruments of mass murder. Back in 2019, when Liubyi began his work on the film, he says that he felt this war would change the world. The overarching idea of the film is to show that there can be no war that does not affect us. Every war affects everyone on the planet, and the Russian war against Ukraine is no exception.

Fragile Memory, an intimate family film created without links or references to the war, may seem like a film from another reality and another life in this selection. But maybe it is this film, in which the young filmmaker records the memory loss of his grandfather, once a famous and successful cinematographer, is what creates a bridge between the old and the new worlds, addressing the questions of the strength and weakness of our memory. The fragility and the power of our lives.

Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days in Mariupol has a line about how it is impossible to look at the war. It is very painful. But we have to look. And we have to feel pain from it. It is equally impossible to watch your grandfather suffer from Alzheimer’s, or to look at a photo of your family member who died in a plane crash. It is impossible and painful to look at your family who are forced to live in a gym in a strange city. But we have to. We will not be able to create an image of the future without this.

Main photo: a still from the film 20 Days in Mariupol.

Text: Darya Bassel, coordinator of the DOCU/UKRAINE programme, Head of DOCU/PRO Industry Platform.

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The 20th anniversary of Docudays UA is held with support from the Embassy of Sweden in Ukraine, the Embassy of Switzerland in Ukraine, the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation, US Embassy in Ukraine, the Embassy of Ireland in Ukraine, the Embassy of Denmark in Ukraine, the Embassy of Brazil in Ukraine, the Polish Institute in Kyiv and the Czech centre Kyiv. The opinions, conclusions or recommendations do not necessarily reflect the views of the governments or organisations of these countries. Responsibility for the content of the publication lies exclusively on the authors and editors of the publication.