Discoveries from Ukraine World Cinema

Few weeks of Taras Shevchenko in Kazakhstan exile, before his discharge out of army, when agents of the secret police were in hot pursuit of him.

A successful colorist accidentally loses his sight but tries to stay in the profession. His colorblind student, who used to be a programmer in the past, is helping him with this task by using modern advances in technology. Circumstances force them to unite and overcome their fears together.

The 37-year-old man is working for a Corporation, which is engaged in illegal occupation of rural land. Leaving for another "object", he discovers a huge unfinished cathedral at the infinite field. He needs to decide what to do with the cathedral, as well as to subdue a farmer who rightfully owns the land.

Based on Wolfgang Goethe's poem "Forest King". Farewell to children's dreams about the perfection of the world and the permanence of nature. The film has three main characters: the boy Oleksii and his parents, Andriy and Oleksandra. And someone Maxim, the king of the forest, the wind is the subject of secret admiration and fear of Oleksiy: "My dear, the king of the forest is talking to me: he promises gold, pearls and joy" - "Oh no, my baby, you didn't hear that: that wind, waking up, the leaves swayed."

A series of 26 short stories, each featuring a protagonist intent on meeting someone at a Kyiv nightclub. These stories depict a real-life scenario of club encounters, where the goal is to “pick up” - achieve sexual satisfaction swiftly for the thrill of it - all captured by a hidden camera.

It is inspired by the true story of the girls and women of a Ukrainian family forced to find rescue from the war. Although... War can never truly be escaped.

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine has changed the lives of every Ukrainian. Formerly bankers, IT workers, cultural figures and others have become military personnel and volunteers, people resisting the greatest threat to peaceful life in all of Europe.

Combined with Music and Story, this is the remarkable history by Ukranian vocalist Tina Karol herself about the horrible circumstances that turned into incredible successes. From deceit and death to Beauty, Power and Soul.

Adorned in pink sequins, little girls from all over a divided, war-torn Ukraine audition to play the role of a national hero whose tears of joy once united their troubled country, the gold-winning figure skater Oksana Baiul.

When American Peter Duke joined a convoy from Estonia to Kyiv to deliver critical aid to Ukrainian troops, he unexpectedly discovered a country echoing the spirit and unity of America's birth in 1776. Duke witnessed the people involved in this struggle up close revealing remarkable acts of selflessness and purpose that transcended borders and politics. It changed his perception of the conflict and himself. He returned home, impassioned and determined to do more. He shared his story with his friend Keith Ori, and it ignited a mission purpose for them both!

A crafty old wizard and his cat lived in a messy house and often went hungry, because they did not like to clean up or cook. Once they came up with the idea to take a hardworking girl from the village, Olenka, in a limbo. And so it was done. After the threats of magic, she agreed to do all of their housework. But magic peas found in the garden of gave her hope for salvation.

A humorous animated series, the events of which take place in a fictional state called “Fairytale Rus”. Modern politicians from different countries appear here in the form of fairy-tale heroes familiar to every viewer from childhood. The characters of the cartoon are Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande, Vladimir Putin, Petro Poroshenko, Vitaliy Klitschko and Yulia Tymoshenko… The animated series features very sharp and accurate parodies of them. The heroes go through many adventures, trying to solve the complex problems of our time.

Mykola Kuńko works as an unlucky TV reporter in early 2000s Ukraine. Together with his trusty camerawoman, Jenya, he is wandering aimlessly through life, from one boring news story to another. One morning, when they are about to go to the premiere of a new rip-off action film, they stumble upon their biggest sensation yet.

Oleg's painstaking search for freedom is interrupted by the sudden return of his ex-girlfriend back to Ukraine, calling into question Oleg's lifestyle in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Film is telling about one life story, where we can see the different point of view from the woman side and from the man side.

A documentary on the Orthodox Church in Ukraine. The Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra is one of the oldest and most valuable treasures inherited from Kyivan Rus. It has always been revered worldwide as the most sacred place of Orthodoxy the cloister that the Blessed Virgin chose for Her abode. This film tells about the cloister‘s history, the architecture and interiors of all churches of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, the deeds of the Pechersk Saints and the monastery‘s present day.

A hotel in a frontline town. A man and a woman, both military personnel, who have recently met, decide to spend a night of love together. Awkwardly communicating with each other, they learn that neither of them drinks alcohol and both take pills. She takes sedatives, he takes sleeping pills. The man clumsily tries to create a romantic atmosphere, but fails. The woman reassures him, and they kiss. During a tender kiss, the woman becomes frightened by this intimacy and goes to take a shower, leaving the man alone in the room.

An old Ukrainian legend tells of love between an ordinary boy Prut and the daughter of the mountain king Hoverla. Cursed love finds a new form of existence to remain high and deep forever.

AMIN portrays Qashqai musician Amin Aghaie, a young modern nomad and his family who despite facing steep financial, cultural and political obstacles are dedicated to their art and culture. Amin travels to remote towns and villages to record the music of the surviving masters whose numbers decline each year. His nomadic family are selling their meager belongings to help support their son's education in performance and ethnomusicology at Tchaikovsky's Conservatory in Kyiv, Ukraine, but it is not enough. Amin, desperate to finish his academic education, sells his violins one at a time just to pay for his tuition.

A great reckoning in a small town. A town without a name. A town not on the map. A town with its own rules. A town without access from the outside. A town with secrets not available even to those 'living' there. How long? Suddenly a time warp, an accident of fate and then unexpectedly the appearance of a woman from beyond. Then it begins. The hidden ways of the town start surfacing. Although no way out of the town, the arrival of Alice puts the town's ways to a test.

Isaac Berg is the only Jew in a small town who miraculously survived during the german occupation. The old man is haunted by one idea - he decided to raise the gravestones with which the nazis paved the road and take them to where his loved ones were killed.

The movie explores the origin of the Ukrainian language and persecution of those who defended its authenticity. Using examples of other countries, creators of the film prove that a nation cannot exist without a language.

Deep love has finally happened in Ukraine.

In the night, someone shoots an elderly couple in their sleep with a hunting rifle, leaving their twenty-year-old son, disabled and confined to a wheelchair, an orphan. The investigation reveals the life story of what seems at first glance to be an ordinary Soviet family. While still young, the couple lost their long-desired infant daughter. Later in life, the fate gives them a child, but he happens to be a boy. The mother's pathological desire to have a daughter becomes an obsession. The woman treats Sashenka as a girl, dresses him as a girl and buys him dolls. The father supports his wife in every way. This is how starts a dramatic and astonishing story of human vices and deviations.

Two warriors of the guerrilla movements, the one from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the other from the Polish Home Army (AK), narrate on the atrocities of German and Soviet occupation in 1939-1946, argue about the mutual harms of the past, and reveal what made them unite after all they've been through.

The film is a study of nature and significance of the hands in cinema. Besides review of movements and actions, which creates an independent story, it reveals interactions and interdependence of cinematic traditions of various authors, countries and periods

A slow, continuous zoom focuses on the Armenian mountains above an ancient riverbed, while the voices of two demons echo off-screen. Inspired by Michael Snow’s Wavelength, a hallucinatory meditation on disappearance.

Kate is a charming but single woman. She had two serious relationships in the past, and both of them ended with a hard break up which left her heart-broken and disappointed. Kate's boyfriend added even more misery by cheating on her on the New Year's eve. She does not know yet that New Year's night will miraculously change her entire life...

Motherly love has no limits. When a son is in danger, the mother does not hesitate to rush to his aid. For the sake of saving the child, she is ready to do anything. She even is ready to go through the hell of war. When Sofia finds out that a transport plane, the pilot of which is her son, was shot down, she sets off for the front line. Her journey is full of dangers. She does not know whether her son or any other member of the crew survived. She has no friends there on the unfamiliar territory, no helpers, no clear plan. There is only her willpower. But it is her will and love that help her to find people who begin to sympathize and help her, and thereby change themselves. A dangerous journey turns her from the mother of one pilot into the mother of all who need to be saved, who need the spiritual rebirth. She is ready to come for even those whom she considered an enemy.

A surreal fairy tale for adult viewers, mixing animated and live performances. Wasn't finished due to budget problems.

Wanting to commit suicide, the guy intends to jump off the bridge. An unfamiliar girl intervenes in the process. After communicating with her, the guy still decided to return to life. Still ahead.

Displacement crisis has reached 100 million people globally. 60+ Ukrainian refugees were involved in making the film, sending a message of support to all refugees. The film focuses on the PTSD that people experience after fleeing the war.

Larysa Kadochnikova is a screen legend of Ukrainian cinema who played Marichka in Serhii Paradzhanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. On 24 February 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she refused to evacuate and stayed in Kyiv during the offensive. The film tells the story of her life in those dire times. The story of a new reality where the past, the present, the future, memories, meditations, and dreams intertwine as the war goes on…

A photographer, who creates collage portraits of women, is working on a portrait. His current girlfriend is tired of being used only as a piece in his collages. After breaking up with her he seeks to reunite with his former woman. To get her back, he deliberately hurts himself.

The 11-year-old protagonist of the film is an ordinary Ukrainian boy who lived his best life in his native Mariupol. Yuriy had everything that makes everyone happy: a loving family, loyal friends and a home. He was just starting to live, learning to love and facing difficulties in his life. However, on February 24, 2022, everything changed radically - the enemy occupiers crossed the threshold of his home and killed his father, sister and grandfather. The boy was left with only his mother Ira and his bedridden grandmother...

Athena and Pallas had planned to join the army together. Pallas enlisted, but Athena, afraid, stayed behind. She had promised to follow — but Pallas died.

The times of NEP. Nineteen-year-old Maria comes from a provincial town to the capital to be with those who are building a bright future. She gets a job, changes her name to a more romantic one - Bianca - and looks forward to meeting the great and pure love about which she has read a lot...

A young man who lives in a small village finds a corpse of extraterrestrial creature. Or at least he thinks so...

Tina Karol plays the role of a mother, the keeper of Ukrainian traditions, who tells her son a story about eternal values, the struggle between good and evil, light and darkness on Christmas Eve.

The man has created a machine capable of hearing plants, and something more.

A documentary about how Russia has been using popular culture as a weapon against Ukraine for decades. Together with industry participants, the film's narrator, musician Albert Tsukrenko, explores the financial, political and psychological reasons for the vulnerability of Ukrainian artists and reflects on how to break this vicious circle. Unfortunately, our own Ukrainian talents are becoming the ammunition in this weapon. Several generations of original Ukrainian musicians at different times in the 1970s and 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, and 2010s switched from Ukrainian to Russian in their work. Whether willingly or unwittingly, they became tools of Russian show business, which has always sought to blur the cultural border between Russia and Ukraine and worked to promote the imperial myth of "one nation".

This film, marking the 130th anniversary of Oleksandr Dovzhenko's birth, reveals the artist's controversial path—from his first attempts at cinema to the creation of masterpieces that became symbols of Ukrainian poetic cinema. The authors show his ability to maneuver between creative ambitions and the political demands of the era, remaining a unique figure in cultural history.

A story about a lonely, unfulfilled woman who is afraid of becoming useless. But the one who really needs it is considered a burden.

Tolik, an openly gay bohemian singer/artist in the Ukrainian underground scene, is raising his niece Katya, a stubborn little girl who has taken to calling him Dad. Her mother, Anya, is both at the heart of the film and almost doomed to the fringes, adrift between solitude and stays in a psychiatric hospital.

Kholodny Yar is a misterious place in the heart of Ukraine, where history meets present in strange ways. Stunning landscapes and meditative moods are represented in this version of the film. Following the nature we plunge in the history of the paradoxical amount of rebellions and try to answer the question: what forces people to defend their freedom at the cost of their own lives?

Two brothers in Donbas, younger Kolya and older Kostya, have a different view of what is going on and what each of them should do next. The tension between them is escalating, even more so because the conflict about the war is not the only one dividing them. ‘

When the schoolboy Petryk takes revenge on his classmates by erasing their names from a letter, they disappear from the real world and fall into the land of Baronia. In order to save them, Petryk must change himself and reveal the secret of Baronia. Together with his friend Katya and their teacher Bo-Bo, Petryk travels to Baronia to save their friends. Petryk turns from an avenger into a hero and conquers the cruel world of Baronia.

In January 2025, experimental jazz duo Myshko Birchenko and Yevhen Puhachov, members of Hyphen Dash, travelled to Kramatorsk without any pre-made drafts or demo recordings to use music as a vessel to capture the emotions present in a place on the edge of a battle for survival and explore the therapeutic nature of music and improvisation in the brutal reality of war. They packed all the equipment into a car, drove 700 kilometres from Kyiv to the frontline city Kramatorsk, and turned one of many basements which serve as shelters into a makeshift recording studio. As a result, they recorded over 300 minutes of music, which were eventually distilled into a 90-minute album.

It is the early 20th century. Tevye the Dairyman lives in a small village in Ukraine. He is poor and believes that his daughters have one chance to escape poverty – a successful marriage. Tevye accepts a profitable proposition from a matchmaker, but his beautiful daughters have a different plan.

An adult animated movie about gender relationships.

Dzidzio, Lesyk and Yulik decide to make money on freebies, but they meet "Pavuk"/"The Spider" on their way.

A documentary film confession that introduces the viewer to a girl named Anya. She candidly recounts her experiences in relationships that have had a profound impact on her life. Her emotional swings—from elation to despair—are approaching a critical point.

A girl Ania dreams of a young man, a sailor, whom she saw only once in a photograph. At this time, a sailor, who turns out to be illegally transporting weapons, dreams of meeting an unusual girl, leaving a dangerous business and leaving for the islands. Ania reads "Mahabharata", "Iliad", "Elder Edda" and listens to rock and roll every day by the sea. The sailor and the girl are destined to meet in the final, and a faithful friend will help to avoid danger - an old car, "Volga" GAZ-21.

The film tackles a difficult and complex subject: the Lviv Pogroms of June and July 1941 and the subsequent unfolding of the Shoah in the city.

Since the 18th century, the Lychakiv cemetery in Lviv has been the resting place of those who have defended the city against invaders throughout its history. Close to the Austro-Hungarian graves or those dating from the Second World War, a forest of flags has sprung up on freshly dug tombs, such as that of Y.L Petrov, who fell in 2023 defending the freedom of his country.

Zorya is a celestial being responsible for the cycle of day and night, as well as creating and releasing the colors of the sky. However, one day, she mysteriously awakes in the human realm, nearby a small neolithic village, where she meets and befriends a young local potter named Hart who promises to lead her back home. However, after falling for a trap set up by a shaman from a northern nomadic warrior tribe who have their sights set on conquering the village, Zorya and Hart will have to band together to stop an ancient evil that might doom civilization as they know it.

Two degenerates, the soft sentimental Styopa and the Ukrainian street smart rough and macho Kolya rob the unfinished country houses during a winter's night. Using the alcoholic infused skills of a theif they only manage to steal a satellite dish and a street lamp. At sunrise, they're chased by dogs guarding this area.

A sequel to the 1991 feature Afganets, about a returning Soviet fighter from Afghanistan who had turned to crime.