Five Ukrainian (co)productions at advanced stages of production or post-production were pitched August 30 during B2B Doc Industry in the Polish city of Gdynia. Before the event, film teams responded to questions posed by BDE.
Olga Chernykh’s A Picture to Remember is a first–person account of one family’s long journey through war, as experienced across several generations. The film searches for “a way to cope with recurring patterns of displacement and loss.”
The synopsis describes how the memories of director Chernykhƒ set the tone, “and her voice leads us through decades of family archives and events of the past nine years of upheaval.” Along the way we meet her mother, Olena, head of a pathology department; her artist father and a grandmother who is determined to stay in the occupied Donetsk.
“Thrown in to the limbo of a fragmented world – and in search of answers – the director dives in to a kaleidoscope of memories both personal and collective in an attempt to find something to hold onto in times of turbulence,” the synopsis further reads.
“A Picture to Remember is a poetic and personal response to the war,” explains producer Regina Maryanovska-Davidzon of Ukrainian outfit Real Pictures. “After the 2014 conflict with Russia, many of the Donbass inhabitants left everything: work, home, friends. This is the case of the director’s family and it is the starting point of the film. But it is in essence closely linked to the events that marked the Donbass region since the Soviet era. For her first feature length documentary film, Olga Chernykh addresses a question that haunts us all: what to do when we have only our memories left? In other words: how do we keep alive the memory of a world that is fading away? The documentary addresses the universal dimension of exile and loss.”
Chernykh herself adds: “The film has a unique perspective of telling a war-related story with an intimate, honest and poetic approach to storytelling. We are making a film about the war without showing war directly and focusing on reflecting the causes, losses and traumas that it brings. But still keeping the war as a main background of the story. We believe that our film stands out from the amount of footage, images and stories you have recently seen from Ukraine.”
“I started the project around 3.5 years ago and Regina joined 3 years ago,” director Chernykh explains of how the project has evolved since its inception. “The idea of a film was here from the very beginning but the visual form and the approach to storytelling changed quite dramatically after the full-scale invasion in Ukraine. I rethought the whole concept of the structure of the film with the desire to transfer the viewer a feeling of being in a vague state in between reality and a dream, reality and memories.”
Co-produced with LuFilms (France) and Flavia Tama Filmproduktion (Germany), the A Picture to Remember team is looking for €33,000 to reach its full budget of €178,022. In Gdynia producer Maryanovska-Davidzon is seeking sales representation, distribution and festivals.
In Flowers of Ukraine by Adelina Borets, Natalia lives harmoniously with her two husbands – one Ukrainian and the other Russian – in a tiny green paradise in the midst of the concrete jungle of Kyiv. She defends her ‘queendom’ against real estate developers, but the real fight begins with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. As Natalia makes Molotov cocktails alongside her granddaughter, she suffers the loss of one of her husbands. Yet all the time she continues to crack jokes.
The film, budgeted at €238,400 with €203,300 in place, is produced by Glib Lukianets of Ukrainian company Gogol Vertigo and his Polish company Gogol Film, and co-produced by Natalia Grzegorzek of Koskino (Poland). Confirmed partners on the project are Eurimages, Polish Film Institute, Ukrainain Cultural Foundation, TVP, STROOM, DI Factory. Delivery is expected in 2024.
“We have two selling points,” says Lukianets. “First, we have a unique location where our protagonist lives and where most part of the action happens. It’s the only place like that in Ukraine – a green paradise surrounded by cement jungles. The second point is the genre. There are not so many melancholic comedies coming out during the war. Flowers of Ukraine is one (or the only) of them.”
“Such a piece of land and such a hero exists in almost every country,” he adds. “We show it in Ukraine, but it can be everywhere, even if war doesn’t break out. This gives us this international potential when people from different parts of the world will associate themselves with our protagonist Natalia.”
Dmytro Hreshko’s Divia presents the “ravaged body of Ukrainian nature” as the main character within a visual and sonically-driven observational documentary. Silently laying bare the catastrophic impacts of war, nature resists and gradually heals itself. But not without the help of caring human hands. Deminers, body searchers, ecologists and animal activists enter the ravaged landscape, “attempting to do whatever they can to measure the scale of collective tragedy, tend to the body of their beloved and try to restore lost natural resources.”
Confirmed partners on the project are FILMBOOST, the Ukrainian Film Academy, the Göteborg Film Fund, Polish Film Institute and Emergency Support Initiative by Kyiv Biennial.
Producers Polina (UP UA Studio) and Gogol Film’s Glib Lukianets have so far raised just under €200,000 of the film’s €533,465 budget. “Our project is about nature and about man and about war. These things are universal, but in Ukraine they are perceived in their own way. What will an investor get by investing in our project? To be a part of something eternal and grandiose,” Hreshko explains to BDE.
“Even before the full-scale invasion of Russia into Ukraine, we were developing a project on the impact of Ukrainian society on nature – the conflict of cities and industrial facilities against nature,” the director adds. “But after the invasion of Russia and looking at the natural destruction, we decided to focus on the consequences of the war. Of course, this does not diminish human tragedies, hundreds of thousands of people suffered during the war and lost their homes, and even entire cities were destroyed, but in our film we want to show exactly the impact of war on nature and animals.”
“Right now, until the end of the year, we are still in the production stage, but we have already started editing to understand what other episodes need to be completed for the film. The plan is to complete the film by the fall of 2024.”
Zinema by Kornii Hrytsiuk sets out to explore the development of Russian propaganda in cinema and its impact on Russian society. The film tells of “movies created to kill” and offers “a 30-year journey through xenophobia and propaganda in Russian cinema, which have become a part of important ideological preparations for military aggression against Ukraine and other countries around the globe.” In the film title, the letter Z represents the main symbol of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The UA/Lux co-pro is budgeted at a modest €39,216, with €8095 in place. The project’s co-producer is Philippe Schockweiler Media. Another confirmed partner is Democracy Frontline.
“We think that our film is very important at this time. In our opinion, this is not ‘another film about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.’ Zinema shows how Russia uses culture, and cinema in particular, to ‘highlight’ its wars and aggression,” says director Hrytsiuk.
“In our film, we show this not only with the example of Ukraine, as we also talk about Chechnya, Syria, Georgia and other Russian military adventures over the past 30 years. It seems to us that our film shows that what is happening in Ukraine is not ‘Putin’s war’, it is a system, it is the constant use of art by Russian politicians for their imperial ambitions…This country [Russia] in its current form uses everything it can for its attacks. Therefore, it is very important that our film be seen, including in those countries where they continue to believe that Russian politics and Russian culture are different things, and we must support the latter,” Hrytsiuk adds.
“Our goal is not only to make a high-quality film, but also to present it on a large scale outside of Ukraine. That is why we take part in international programs, exchange experience with colleagues, and expand our base of potential partners right now, while the film is being worked on,” the director continues. “It has become more international. When we started this project, we thought about making a film that would show how Russians portrayed Ukrainians in movies and prepared a war against our country. But the more we delved into the topic, the more it became clear that their propaganda through mass feature films is directed not only against Ukraine, but also against other peoples. Therefore, now our project has an international focus.”
A fifth Ukrainian project presented at B2B Doc Industry Days Cutting Edge was Up In The Air, directed by Oksana Syhareva and produced by Syhareva and Nataliia Pogudina. Co-producers on the €320,000 project (of which €134,000 is already raised) are Czech outfits Film Kolektiv and Hypermarket Films, and Baltic Productions (Lithuania). In the project, set for release in 2024, a young Ukrainian boy dreams of becoming a circus acrobat. The dream seems to die as the war sets off a conflict between his coach and her son, but luck comes his way in exile… Sales on Up In The Air are handled by Taskovski Films.
Two further projects were pitched at B2B Doc Industry Days Cutting Edge, one of which was the Georgian Ever Since I Knew Myself, directed and produced by Maka Gogoladze. In late production and co-produced with Anke Petersen and Lilian Tieyjen (Jyoti Film, Germany), the film tells of Maka, a maths teacher and daughter of a demanding mother, who travels around Georgia to observe children under various forms of education. Seemingly travelling through bost past and present, this journey “goes hand in hand with an impassioned conversation between a mother and daughter at odds.” The project won the Alphapanda Award at Cannes Docs 2023.
