This year, 9 Ukrainian documentary films from Docudays UA and a photo exhibition titled UA_24022022.JPG will be presented at the DokuFest film festival in Kosovo. The events will begin on 5 August and will last for 5 days. Here, we share information about the film program, filmmakers, curators, and artists who will be part of the delegation.
As noted by the organisers of the festival in Kosovo, the Focus Ukraine programme for them “is more than an artistic exchange; it's a crucial part of the rebuilding efforts for both Kosovo and Ukraine. By sharing stories of recovery and resilience, this initiative fosters greater cultural understanding and empathy. It highlights how art can bridge gaps, bring people together, and play a significant role in the process of rebuilding societies after conflict.”
Ukrainian filmmakers will present 5 feature films, including Iron Butterflies by Roman Liubyi, an investigation into the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17; Intercepted by Oksana Karpovych, based on intercepted phone conversations of russians; Mission 200 by Volodymyr Sydko, the story of a Ukrainian woman transporting the bodies of fallen soldiers during the full-scale invasion; A Bit of a Stranger by Svitlana Lishchynska, which observes four generations of women from a family who come from Mariupol; and Nice Ladies by Maria Ponomaryova, a film about the relationships and challenges faced by a cheerleading team of women aged 50+ from Kharkiv.
The program will also feature 4 short films: Boots in the Ground, Hands in the Soil by Karolina Uskakovych, about the director's connection with her own grandmother and the therapeutic power of growing plants; Our Home by Anna Yutchenko, which observes her apartment in Lviv in February 2022 as a transit point; Position by Yuriy Pupyrin, about a group of Ukrainian soldiers from a Territorial Defence battalion who head out to a combat position just a few hundred metres from enemy positions; and Peace and Tranquillity from the 2022 festival by Myro Klochko and Anatoliy Tatarenko, a drama-essay written two weeks after Russia's invasion of Ukraine about the life of playwright Andriy Bondarenko in Ukraine: the peace and tranquillity of his childhood, bound together by historical traumas, revolutions, and war.
“This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Russian-Ukrainian war. During this time, since 2014, documentary cinema in Ukraine has become an effective agent of social change, a safe space for rethinking the past and present and building a common vision of the future. Even with the beginning of the full-scale phase of the war, Ukrainian documentary filmmakers use the power of the film language in order not only to record the tragic reality, but also to raise important, albeit difficult, questions of (co)existence in our modern world.
“I sincerely thank our colleagues from DokuFest for holding this great focus programme, because I believe that it is also able to strengthen the cultural bridge between our countries and unite us in understanding the need to build a new global security architecture for a better future,” comments Yulia Kovalenko, the Programme Director of Docudays UA, for her international colleagues.
Directors Oksana Karpovych, Svitlana Lishchynska, Maria Ponomaryova, Karolina Uskakovych, the protagonist of the film Mission 200 Tetiana Pototska, as well as producer Natalia Yakovleva, will attend the film festival in Kosovo and have the opportunity to engage in live dialogue with the audience about their films.
One of the important components of the programme will be the DokuTalks platform for film professionals, activists, and scholars. Co-curated by producer and Head of DokuLab Eroll Bilibani and Kosovar-Swiss filmmaker Dea Gjinovci, two panel discussions will spotlight Ukrainian artists as well as representatives of Docudays UA and address the challenges of filming war crimes, drawing lessons from the Balkan conflicts, and exploring how human rights film festivals can support filmmakers during crises, offering a platform for support and sharing valuable experiences and strategies.
Photo credit: Mykhailo Palinchak, from the "Shyrokyne" series
Photographers Yana Kononova, Daria Svertilova, Mykhailo Palinchak, Volodymyr Petrov, Sasha Kurmaz, Heorhii Ivanchenko, and Roman Bordun will showcase their works as part of the UA_24022022.JPG exhibition in the DokuPhoto program. Curated by Oleksandra Nabieva and Ferdi Limani (DokuFest), the exhibition brings together works by Ukrainian photographers who document the war and reflect on these practices in their artistic projects.
“I am very grateful to the DokuFest team and their curatorial optics, which included the still image in the conversation about the new order. The emergence of documentary photography is integrally linked to the history of wars, and it begins a complex discussion about the relationship between media and reality. However, photography remains essential in the context of documentation and evidence. Before the advent of the moving image, photography highlighted the grey areas of social inequality and injustice. Ukrainian photographers have witnessed, reflected, and reminded us of the various facets of this disaster, the Russian-Ukrainian war, for ten years,” shares Oleksandra Nabieva, the curator of the DOCU/SYNTHESIS Interdisciplinary Art Programme and the LAB:DOCU/SYNTHESIS x Ukraine War Archive project.
The Focus Ukraine project is implemented by DokuFest Kosovo and Docudays UA with the support of IZOLYATSIA Foundation, Trans Europe Halles and Malý Berlín and co-financed by the ZMINA: Rebuilding programme, created with the support of the European Union under a dedicated call for proposals to support Ukrainian displaced people and the Ukrainian cultural and creative sectors.
Header photo: A still from Nice Ladies
