GLORY TO MSTYSLAV
Maryna Nikolcheva, Maksym Vasyanovych
Ukraine / 2020, 28 min
Mstyslav was a street musician. He reckoned Christ was a gay and considered a friendship between a man and a woman impossible. This film is a last memory of him, the evidence of his courage, dignity and deep vulnerability.
RUINS IN REVERSE
Olena Newkryta
Ukraine / 2020, 25 min
Shot in the steppe-like landscape of southern Ukraine, the short film follows the transformation process of a vacant Soviet residential building. Built according to a standardized Soviet master plan, its layout is slowly being dismantled by individuals, who create new architectures from the extracted modules. Thus, the traces of private biographies and vestiges of past ideologies inscribed into the physical remnants, continue to circulate in the community and find their ways into new constructions.
Ruins in Reverse addresses this process of appropriation and utilization as a form of material engagement with the past as well as an act of self-empowerment. Considering on the one hand, the Soviet infrastructures and belief systems which continue to affect the everyday life; on the other hand, the massive political upheavals and privatization processes at the beginning of the 90s, the film raises questions on how individuals as well as communities deal with such asynchronicities, how they navigate between the socialist and capitalist ruins and which forms of reflection and interaction emerge.
SIMILAR IMAGE
Lera Malchenko, Oleksandr Hants (fantastic little splash)
Ukraine / 2020, 9 min
On the beach or in the forest, when you close your eyes, you hear the sound of water, wind, rustle leaves, insects. You can still hear the motorboat, ringtone, highway, drone buzzing, plant. When you just listen, the sounds mix; gently comes that all this nature is not the first or the second, it is the canvas, including you. But as soon as you open your eyes, you notice order everywhere. Human ordered the world more and more rapidly, until he found himself in the forest — unpredictable and magical * • It seems if you go deeper, you will have to expose yourself to danger and disappear * it also seems that this disappearance is not about absence, but about another form of presence.: *
SENSITIVE MATERIAL
Nataliya Ilchuk
Ukraine | 2021, 26 min
The film's starting point is a collection of randomly filmed instants of happiness and an accidentally captured audio recording. In a painful conversation, fifty-year-old Lilia speaks of her mental trauma as a result of her parents' constant disputes during her childhood, while her mother justifies the lack of love by the strict frames of a totalitarian society.