Cultural Code of Ukraine: East (2023)

Stones in Cold Water

Filmed throughout Ukraine just months before the full-scale Russian invasion, this vérité visual ethnography explores the overlaps of memory, hope, progress, and nostalgia at the scale of everyday life.

Vika

A 17 year-old Ukrainian orphan with fiery red hair, bright blue eyes and an everlasting laugh is setting out into the world for the very first time, all alone. In her final year at a rural boarding school in Eastern Ukraine, she fights to maintain the bond with her 10 year-old sister, Arina, who was adopted by a family in Toronto in 2014 during the Ukrainian revolution. Vika hasn't seen Arina since she left Ukraine, but her ultimate goal is to one day reunite with her sister - the only family she has left - and start a life in Canada.

Bitter Harvest

Set between the two World Wars and based on true historical events, Bitter Harvest conveys the untold story of the Holodomor, the genocidal famine engineered by the tyrant Joseph Stalin. The film displays a powerful tale of love, honour, rebellion and survival at a time when Ukraine was forced to adjust to the horrifying territorial ambitions of the burgeoning Soviet Union.

Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World

New York City's beloved Ukrainian restaurant Veselka is best known for its borscht and varenyky, but it has become a beacon of hope for Ukraine. As the second-generation owner Tom Birchard reluctantly retires after 54 years, his son Jason faces the pressures of stepping into his father’s shoes as the war in Ukraine impacts his family and staff.

Euromaidan. Rough Cut

Three months of revolution. From indignant protest to national unity. From pots on their heads to batons and body armor. From the euphoria of victory to the mourning of the fallen Heavenly Hundred. Revolution as an explosion of revived dignity, as the euphoria of freedom, as the pain of awareness at the cost, as the birth of the modern history of Ukraine. This year we have decided not to have an opening film, because all our attention is focused on the changes taking place in our country today. We have asked the directors who filmed the Ukrainian protests to share their best shots with us. The episodes of these upcoming films about the Euromaidan were formed in a kaleidoscope of revolution, which needs no comment. We offer you a chronicle of the Ukrainian protest. Experience the three months of fighting with us, feel and see the revolution through our eyes.

Ukraine: The People's Fight

Filmmaker Olly Lambert spends two months on Ukraine’s southern frontline with volunteer special forces as they begin the push to capture Kherson. The film follows “Hummer”, an experienced military commander who now finds himself a chaperone to completely inexperienced forces on the frontline.

Do No Harm

Oksana, a Ukrainian doctor, is living in Finland when Russia attacks Ukraine. She hops on a bus with Finnish volunteers and heads to the border of Ukraine and Poland. The goal of these rescue operations is to bring as many Ukrainians fleeing the war to Finland as possible.

This Rain Will Never Stop

This Rain Will Never Stop takes the audience on a powerful, visually arresting journey through humanity’s endless cycle of war and peace. The film follows 20-year-old Andriy Suleyman as he tries to secure a sustainable future while navigating the human toll of armed conflict. From the Syrian civil war to strife in Ukraine, Andriy’s existence is framed by the seemingly eternal flow of life and death.

Homefront

A family with five children flees the war raging in their home village on the Russian border. They end up in Mshanets, a farming village on the other side of the country, remote and unknown. Here the family starts building a new home. At the same time, two documentary makers come to the village, looking for a story. In the Lymar family they find the ideal characters for their film. But one day, when the renovation of their house is almost finished, the family disappears. The filmmakers go in search of their characters and along the way they try to find an answer to the question: what does a person need to feel at home?

The Hardest Hour

The unique testimony of the tragic events and crimes of russia through the eyes of Ukrainians, which the entire world must see and feel. Film was created from 200 hours of chronicles: survival, resistance, and life during the war. Every minute was filmed by Ukrainians with their mobile phones. Each story in the documentary is a film captured and filmed by Ukrainians on their devices.

The Football Nation

The documentary tells about the birth, history of formation and development of the National Football Team of Ukraine in the period from 1992 to 2022.

Crimea. As It Was

The film is a story about the officers, soldiers and seamen who did not betray their oath of loyalty to the people of Ukraine and their first hand accounts about Russia's invasion and annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula. They continue to fulfill their military obligations on land, on sea and in the air today.

Slava Ukraini

One year after the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy takes us to the heart of the combat through this war diary made during the second half of 2022. From Kharkiv and Bakhmut to Kherson, in the aftermath of the city’s liberation, this documentary bears witness to the ravages of war through the testimonies of soldiers, chronicles of the front and portraits of civilians, and shares with us the struggle of the Ukrainian people.

Ukraine's War: The Other Side

This unique feature-length documentary follows filmmaker Sean Langan's journey into the Russian side of the war in Eastern Ukraine, the only independent UK journalist to report from what is almost exclusively a hidden and otherwise inaccessible side of this conflict. In an intimate look at a side of Russia’s war rarely seen in Western media, Sean heads into the Russian-occupied Donbas region to find out through the eyes of soldiers on the Eastern front and civilians coping with war in the streets how the conflict is affecting them.

Oleksa Dovbush

The story of the "Hutsul Robin Hood" Oleksa Dovbush, an 18th century Carpathian Mountains outlaw who's a popular figure of Ukrainian legend.

Don't Leave Me Behind: Stories of Young Ukrainian Survival

The fears and resiliencies within a group of teenage refugees from Ukraine are uncovered in this film that brings the camera steps away from the front lines to the Ukraine-Poland border.

Lightning Before Thunder

A short documentary about how "Fulton" the Ukrainian Football Club came together.

Belarus: An Ordinary Dictatorship

It’s the last dictatorship of Europe, caught in a Soviet time-warp, where the secret police is still called the KGB and the president rules by fear. Disappearances, political assassinations, waves of repression and mass arrests are all regular occurances. But while half of Belarus moves closer to Russia, the other half is trying to resist…

Ukraine: Enemy in the Woods

A revealing and moving portrait of lives compromised by war, filmed exclusively by Ukrainian soldiers with extraordinary access to a tightly-controlled frontline.

Superpower

Sean Penn and Aaron Kaufman’s documentary, shot just before and after Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24th February 2022, and featuring several interviews with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Taras Bulba

Ukraine, 16th century. While the Poles dominate the Cossack steppes, Andrei, son of Taras Bulba, a Cossack leader, must choose between his love for his family and his folk and his passion for a Polish woman.

Babi Yar. Context

Nazi troops massacre 30,000 Jews over a three-day period in September 1941. Babyn Yar ravine in Kyiv, Ukraine.

V. Silvestrov

There is a rumor in the Kyiv musical community: once upon a time, in private conversation, Queen Elizabeth II mentioned Valentyn Silvestrov as one of her favorite composers of the modern age. The Royal Press Office hasn’t confirmed it, so no one knows for sure. But the stature of Silvestrov justifies this rumor. Highly respected by the world’s best music professionals, he remains a mystery for a wide audience. The documentary is far from a traditional biopic about a prominent person. It is an observation, a confession and, most of all, a story of great talent set against the backdrop of uncertain times.

Maidan

A chronicle of the civil uprising against the regime of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych that took place in Kyiv in the winter of 2013/14. The film follows the progress of the revolution: from peaceful rallies, half a million strong in the Maidan square, to the bloody street battles between protesters and riot police.

Crimea. The Stolen Peninsula

Documentary film about war crime — annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation.

Life to the Limit

From the Revolution of Dignity to full-scale war: successful Ukrainian film producers took up arms to defend the country and cameras to record the gruesome reality. From the fragments of memories and their own film archive, veterans Pavlo and Yurko assemble a mosaic of the causes and consequences of today's Russian-Ukrainian war - from the end of 2013 to today. The authors went to the front as volunteers, visited the hotspots of Donbas, created the home-made drone "Furia", which is now named after one of the best air reconnaissance units. And all this time they continued to create in order to show the world the truth about the terrible war that became possible in the 21st century.

Maksym Osa: The Gold of Werewolf

Ukraine - 1636. Someone has attacked a battalion of cossacks that were transporting the gold of the Polish king. A cossack - Maksym Osa - tries to find the missing gold, but soon becomes one of the main suspects.

Ivan and Marta

Ivan Dziuba - literary critic, public figure, academician of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine - belongs to the "sixties". He fully takes care of all the miscalculations and unfulfilled promises of his generation. Reflects on why the illusions were lost and why so few dreams came true ... Let's see and listen to him with his wife Martha, a Lviv woman who was his guardian angel. Together - all life. Exactly as they are, the right is the definition - the conscience of the nation.

Askania Reserve

Askania-Nova is the largest steppe wildlife sanctuary in Europe. It is located in south part of Ukraine, not far from Crimea peninsula. In order to underline this unique beauty we created a documentary musical film about life of animals and people in wildlife sanctuary of Askania-Nova. The movie reveals stories of a three protagonists, whose destinies were entangled because of wildlife sanctuary.

Who are we? Psychoanalysis of Ukrainians

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