Discoveries from Ukraine World Cinema

Apartment thieves, along with pickpockets, blocked the road.

Sometimes when you stay alone, silence becomes unbearable.

The story of a 15-year-old boy that isn't with us anymore. Filmed in Ternopil, a city in the western part of Ukraine, in 2015-2016.

A tactile story about self-sufficiency. She has an urgent need for tactility, which she satisfies at the expense of the person next to her. What if the person is gone? Can she live on her own? It is she and her touches that would search for answers.

A guy and a girl are discussing their future - she wants to move to Spain, he will stay in Ukraine.

Mysterious "cleaners" come to clean up the "crime scene".

When Brovary village officially became a town, one third of its residents were communist. After 60 years and three revolutions such proportion didn’t change: thirty percent of its streets keep the names of the former empire.

An alternative "Titanic" which crashes into an iceberg made of "plasticberg" plastic. Jack and Rosa have a fight over the garbage sorting dilemma.

Surrealistic film with two characters who are the one person. Or not. They can't be together but constantly looking for possibilities. Or not. They want to live. Or not.

A woman is surprised by an attacker in her own apartment.

Kyiv, 2019 – total copying of style, views, and hobbies. Obsession with everything new and fashionable, lack of independent thinking, lack of truth and genuine desires. The new generation has stopped asking itself the question: what do I really want to do here and now? But these Ukrainians have their own reality. They are a new generation of young people who think critically. Original. Sincere.

Short subject

The heroes of the film are two families who bring up children with autism spectrum disorders. In the center of the plot are two mothers, with their sons (10 and 15 years old). Women are friends, share difficulties and joys, support each other, although they live in different countries. The film about autism addresses not only the community whose families it has touched, but society as a whole. It is an invitation to each spectator to understand, tolerance and expand the outlook.

Three stories of interconnection and internegation between creativity and work in modern Ukraine.

Xam is a sci-fi exploration on the future of surveillance and body hacking.

A young girl protests against her parents, and unknowingly gets under the influence of a mysterious tailor, who's threads pierce not only through the fabric but through her mind.

Two cheaters deceive people on the phone and demand money. They call people at night and pretend to be their relatives, who are arrested and beg for money. This time a retired woman Mariia becomes their victim. She is ready to do everything to rescue her nephew Ihor from prison. But cheaters have no clue what is waiting for them after meeting the old helpless woman.

A night ride on the Bohdanivska street in Lviv.

Loran considers himself an author and a man of art, while for the others he is merely an idler. Debt collectors are chasing after him, but Loran still enjoys his life, no matter how hopeless it might be.

Do you remember the moment when you suddenly realized that your parents are complete strangers to you?

Friendship, betrayal, and reconciliation with one’s own old shoes.

Camera observes the biggest rave in Ukraine called Cxema and leads us from the image of a crowd to intimate experience of each dancer.

The new work takes a decaying found film and audiocassette originally made by amateur filmmaker Victor Kyzyma, from Blahovishchenske, Ukraine, where an amateur film studio operated at at a collective farm. Found in 2017, the 16mm film was all but destroyed by lime. The directors created a new narrative and structure.

Transporting cultural value from another dimension, the courier soldier finds himself in the vastness of the Ukrainian present.

A story about the nativity of «rushnyk», a ritual cloth embroidered with symbols and cryptograms of the ancient world.

Pavlo dreams of leaving his dying hometown with his fiancée, but their plans collapse when a ruthless outsider arrives to take over the town’s criminal world, sparking a violent conflict that pulls Pavlo into its center.

After André Levesque missionnaire, Oksana Karpovych is back at the RIDM with her first feature, which she filmed in her native country, Ukraine. To take the pulse of the country, the filmmaker adopts one of documentary cinema’s most prolific sub-genres: the train film. Filmed entirely in the old, run-down, overcrowded passenger trains used by ordinary Ukrainians, the film captures conversations, observes the landscape, and accompanies several protagonists on their journey; they open our eyes to popular preoccupations in a country that seems perpetually anchored in its highly visible Soviet legacy. A fine lesson in listening and humanity.

Death is an unverified rumor.

A whole generation grew up with the music of Ukrainian rock band Dymna Sumish. It brought not only energetic concerts with slams and crashed guitars, but also ideas: of propaganda resistance, vegetarianism, abstinence from alcohol and drugs. But in 2012, the band was put on hold, and its frontman Sasha Chemerov moved to Los Angeles. Musicians got back together in the summer of 2017 and gave a series of powerful shows. «Dymna Sumish: Between Hell and Heaven» is a movie about the comeback, friendship, and rock’n’roll. The film includes interviews with band members, concert footage from different periods and live performances, specially shot for the movie. And although the band split up at the beginning of 2018, we believe that its story and legacy still matter.

In this stop-motion animation, two flickering sets of images perform a fevered dance. Street protesters and soldiers on Maidan Square morph into the underground queer and techno scene in Kiev. One thing connects them: the masks they use to hide their identities, or become someone new entirely. Director Zielony turns to Maskirovka, a term for Russian covert warfare, because “it refers to the fragile and treacherous situation in which the protagonists live and act”.

At the center of the plot are the reflections of the main characters of the film - a girl, a boy and a little girl, different in character, preferences, but united by faith in the fulfillment of their dreams. Dream until the dream comes true, for the dream comes with faith.

For centuries, the peoples of Transcarpathia were isolated by politics, geography and poverty. Following WW1, as neighbouring states eyed the strategic and material potential of Transcarpathia, the region experienced a cultural renaissance. In 1939, as Europe prepared for war, the battle for control of the region escalated. Against a swell of political and military interventions, the republic of Carpatho-Ukraine was born, sowing the seeds for an independent Ukraine.

One letter is able to turn around life of little man.

This is the story about a person who try to be himself almost one evening in all life. He managed to to so, unfortunately paying a nigh prize for it.

A philosophical parable about the life of suburbs.

This is the brief story about defencelessness of the death and audacity of life.

Right before his birthday, a bullied teen locks himself in a dark room, ready to give up on everything. Then, an unexpected knock on the door changes his fate.

An archive of video footage shot on Ukraine's Eastern Front in 2022–2023 views the landscape as a space of rupture, where layers of time overlap and familiar meanings lose their stability.

Hunting for the "Shaheds", the fighters of the mobile fire groups lead a nocturnal lifestyle. Waiting for the target in the dark, being ready to fire throughout the night, is a grueling routine that lasts more than one year, and smoke breaks after sleeping almost all day are a brief opportunity to bask in the rays of the evening sun.

A short experimental animation depicting the continuous deformation and sequential metamorphosis of mechanical, industrial, and biological forms within a monochromatic space.

The modest and shy Zhenya is plagued by a string of misfortunes: the man she had lived with for quite some time has left her, she has lost her job, and her father offers no help because he lives with his new wife and makes decisions only with her approval. To make matters worse, her landlady keeps demanding rent when Zhenya barely has enough to survive. Her friend Masha comes to the rescue, helping Zhenya regain confidence and encouraging her to take action. While discussing possible ways out of her situation, Zhenya remembers that her grandmother possessed ancient mystical knowledge and had once shared many secrets of magic with her. The friends decide that Zhenya should inherit her grandmother’s gift — and perhaps even make a living from it.

Melitopol, a city in Ukraine's southern Zaporizhzhia Oblast, has traditionally been a hub of religious and cultural diversity. Numerous Christian churches operated there, not only coexisting but also effectively collaborating with one another. Among them, Protestant churches were some of the most active and influential. Immediately following the start of Russia's occupation of Melitopol and the wider region in 2022, local Christians faced repression. Clergy were subjected to searches and interrogations by Russian forces. Eventually, several churches were banned and stripped of all property, including their buildings. Priests were either officially deported or forced to flee under threat, with Russian propaganda often accusing them of stockpiling weapons and ammunition. Believers were forced to go underground.

It's the late 1980s and the once seemingly undying Soviet Union is beginning to show signs of collapse, leaving thousands of members of the Ukrainian diaspora in the US and Canada with a chance of returning to the home they have always dreamed of living in. Afraid for their lives, but fueled by patriotism, thousands of them venture to Europe in order to provide the support to their friends relatives and their countrymen through times of crisis and violent protests, culminating in the last 99 days of the USSR and the birth of an independant Ukrainian nation.

According to legend, the Ukrainian hetman Ivan Mazepa was punished for a secret affair by being tied naked to the back of a wild horse. Over time, this story underwent a gender shift, culminating in the 19th century when the British actress Ada Menken played the role on stage.

The story of Rostyslav Lazarenko, Hero of Ukraine and assault aviation pilot with the call sign "Thunder". His combat missions, relationships with his comrades, and dramatic events come to life on the big screen.

A woman recalls Nova Kakhovka—now occupied and ravaged by the Russians—the city where she spent her childhood, where it was always summer, and where her grandfather helped build the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant.

Short film about Anastasia Tarnavska, a resident of the town of Kitsman in Bukovina, who joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in her youth, survived the death of her husband, a long separation from her daughter, whom she was forced to leave in the care of relatives after her birth, arrest and a long stay in exile in Norilsk, where she suffered a serious illness, managed to recover and start a family again, with whom she eventually returned to Ukraine.

Documentary about the history of Ukrainian football.

Swing is an experimental short film set on a nearly deserted beach, where two men navigate the fragile boundary between presence and disconnection. First, absorbed in his smartphone, ignores Second, who is desperate for attention and connection. Their unspoken struggle intensifies around a lonely beach swing—an object that becomes both a symbol of longing and a stage for laughter, frustration, and provocation. Through silence, gestures, and mood shifts, Swing explores our modern obsession with technology, the ache of isolation, and the quiet drama of human interaction.

The experimental film is dealing with the process of globalisation represented by multi-layered real urban and virtual spaces, for which new cultural concept has to be developed. Video explores a topic of the ICT issue. Mobile communication, telematic tools, worldwide collaborative structures and global political alliances create a new cultural landscape whose rules will have to be worked on.

A remake of Mikhail Mikhalkov's 1978 film Five Evenings, which tells the story of a man and a woman separated by war. The artist completely replicates the final scene of the film, in which the main character's monologue ends with the words "If only there were no war, if only there were no war, if only there were no war."

Panel buildings are silent ghosts looming over the inhabitants of large and small cities. These "creatures," with their complex, multi-layered inner worlds, appeared in response to the state's urgent need to provide all families with separate, isolated living spaces.

The goal of the project is to question the contemporary understanding of the environment of art and to create a new and concrete analogy to Zen-Buddhist subjects for meditation, which direct actuality to the fundamental questions related to being.

Based on a Scottish fairy tale about a girl who, through the power of her love, lifted the spell from an enchanted prince.