This year’s Docudays UA will open with Intercepted by Oksana Karpovych. The festival screenings will be closed with Mission 200, directed by Volodymyr Sydko. Gennady Kofman, Member of the Board of NGO Docudays and of the Selection Council, producer, presents the films and shares his thoughts about this choice.
Every year, finding and choosing the opening film is a great adventure. Because it is important to find the exact film that will define the theme of the festival best, most accurately, that will become a kind of guide to the festival week and will also have all the required qualities of a creative documentary which Docudays UA is so attentive to. This year it was a bit easier for us. We knew that Intercepted was being created by one of the strongest teams of Ukrainian documentary filmmakers: director Oksana Karpovych, producers Darya Bassel and Olha Beskhmelnitsyna. The film is based on intercepted phone conversations between Russian troops and their families.
It is a document that is incredibly important for the international audience first and foremost. In addition, the audience can expect a striking author’s statement. I’m convinced that nobody in the audience will have any doubt left after watching this film about who Ukrainians are fighting against and why war has come to our land.
“Intercepted is a story of dehumanisation that doesn’t begin at war, it begins in Russia, in their society through propaganda,” says the director about her film in an interview.
“Surreal, poetic, disturbing, and richly conveyed,” writes the Canadian Point of View Magazine about the film.
After its premiere at the 74th Berlin Film Festival, Intercepted won two special mentions in the Forum competition programme, gained a high international profile and was invited to the programmes of the world’s many leading film forums. Finally, our Ukrainian audience will also have a unique chance to see the film at the opening ceremony of the 21st International Docudays UA festival.
But while we’ve been waiting and ‘hunting’ for Intercepted ever since it was made, this year’s closing film was a discovery and a total surprise for our whole team. The author’s calm, almost detached observation of the minibus driver captures the audience’s attention until the last second. The protagonist of Mission 200, Tetiana Pototska, put her tourism business on hold after the beginning of the full-scale invasion, bought a refrigerator truck for her own money and, covering thousands of kilometres without stops or sleep, she transports those who are going on their last journey ‘on the shield.’
“Personally for me this film is important for giving an opportunity to tell the world about the horrible grief that war brings, and that no country in the world is immune to a tragedy like the one that is happening in Ukraine,” notes Volodymyr Sydko, the director.
Both films are incredibly important testimonies about the causes and consequences of a horrible tragedy in the centre of Europe, both will have a hold over the viewer for a long time after watching. Tellingly, the films are created by members of the newest generation of Ukrainian documentary filmmaking, which is being formed right now, during the great war.
The second festival to screen Intercepted in Ukraine will be Mykolaichuk OPEN in Chernivtsi (15–23 June). The film will begin its theatre run in Ukraine on 29 August 2024.
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