When the Russian invasion began on 24 February 2022, Artem Ryzhykov volunteered to join the Ukrainian army. Equipped with a machine gun and a camera, the filmmaker documents his life as a soldier. But soon it becomes obvious that imagination and reality are drifting apart. While at first exploding bombs shock him so much that he drops to the ground in the barricaded kitchen, and while burnt corpses of a defeated Russian military unit at the Irpin front line provide sensational images, euphoria and sensitivity gradually get lost on the battlefield. Ryzhykov slowly loses his observer’s perspective, the camera degenerates into a “toy” and is replaced by the weapon.
The war leaves traumatic marks. Ryzhykov is increasingly alienated from his own self and his private environment. The overwhelming emotional ballast is no longer easily catalysed, spaces for reflection shrink and the phone calls with his wife Irusya become colder and more tight-lipped. Co-director Juan Camilo Cruz has crafted a narrative strand of immediate power from more than one thousand hours of video material: an intimate insight into the life of a person who is trying to cope with all the chaos.

This both raw and tender work of memory ploughs through reflections, feelings, anecdotes, photos, and drawings, an attempt in cinematic images to capture the grief over a beloved grandfather who fell victim to cancer, make it manageable. Sonia Leliukh takes the liberty of speaking from a deliberately subjective perspective, refusing to tone down her statements with seemingly valid rules of language or etiquette. With her desktop documentary, which seems playful only at first glance, she confronts radical grief with equally radical honesty. By putting the old computer games her grandfather used to distract himself from his pain on screen, she does not only put herself in the role of the terminally ill, but also the audience. When my finger twitches to move the Solitaire cards to the right spot or click on another box at Minesweeper, I am already in the midst of things and must ask myself how I deal with grief, love, or rejection. In the present, but also and especially when the people who inspire these emotions have gone. Sonia Leliukh’s work is a cinematic refusal to allow these feelings to become objects in the sediment of the past.

Toretsk in eastern Ukraine is marked by the decline of the coal industry: wasteland, rubble, scrap metal. In 2014, Russian separatists brought war into the region, destroying homes and families, including Nastya’s. The girl and her friends, all on the brink of adulthood, accept the decaying outskirts, gone to seed in the face of threat and depression, as normal. Taras Tomenko observes their small danced or sung escapes, their moments of obliviousness, sometimes their tears.

Surrounded by high-rises, Natalia has created her own, not-so-small paradise: Goats roam free, shrubs and fruit trees bloom, the chickens busily lay eggs. Natalia meets repeated attempts to buy the plot with brusque derision. Even when the city and country are attacked by Russia in the wintry February of 2022, she retains her apparent carefree resistance: While all the lights around go out at night, there is a warm and cozy glow from Natalia’s house. Only Kitty, with whom she lives, expresses concern, organises his flight from Ukraine and prophylactically shows the spots that would be safest in an air raid.
Adelina Borets’ portrait of an incorruptible woman finds its own unique tone, shows a simple everyday life throughout the seasons that presents itself as self-determined and buoyant despite the worsening situation. Borets adopts Natalia’s manner as natural, gives her space. The dimensions of the war unfold step by step, at Natalia’s own pace and by skilful cuts and pans. “Flowers of Ukraine” is a film about a disaster. But it is also a love song to life – and pickled tomatoes.

In the 1960s, the Soviet cinematographer Leonid Burlaka worked on films that went around the world for the Odesskaya kinostudiya in his native city of Odesa in the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Today he is eighty years old and diagnosed with Alzheimer’s; his memory is visibly fading. Filmmaker Igor Ivanko follows the traces left by his grandfather and discovers an archive of immense value in the garage.

Dozens of rolls of photo film, albeit almost decayed, are found between gardening and other tools. The grandson scans the material and shows it to his grandparents. Burlaka’s face brightens when he recognises familiar faces, but he can’t remember much. Ivanko realises that he has a treasure of historical dimensions in his hands. Leonid Burlaka began his career when many Soviet creative artists were struggling with censorship. When state repression eased in the mid-1960s, he had long established himself in his profession. The political change, however, was reflected in his works. Ivanko’s attempt to record his grandfather’s memories before they disappear forever comes too late. But he succeeds at making a film that looks back on fifty years of cinema and life in the USSR: a stirring portrait of the times and the family between emotion and information.

While studying in Belgium, Daryna Mamaisur witnesses Russia’s attack on her home country Ukraine from a distance. It is getting warmer, the chestnut trees are already in bloom, here in Brussels as well as there in Kyiv. Because she cannot find the words, she makes a film that records this spring – in the distance and nearby. She starts a visual correspondence with Tanya in Kyiv who would rather talk about an argument with her partner or the singing of the birds than the droning of the bombs.
The filmmaker, too, is searching for a way of speaking commensurate with her helplessness and shock. She takes voice lessons and interweaves the shots of recital and vocal exercises with the observations she exchanges with her friend. She directs our attention to the fragility of everyday life – and the experience of war that weighs down even the most relaxed, banal moments.

The hot button issue of pre-war Kyiv: the power of developers. Oleksiy Radynski explores the opposition of an architect who designed one of the most significant buildings in Kyiv and the capitalistic cynicism that ruins the city’s uniqueness. Florian Yuryev’s philosophy of a galaxy’s mortality, of a “beautiful zero” we all are going to return to, contrasts with the ridiculous and dangerous stubbornness of a businessman inspired by Donald Trump.

Click, click, she virtually recreates a cluttered, narrow kitchen on her computer. Lady Di smiles with creased photo edges from the refrigerator, a half-opened chocolate bar lies on the table. The technical-looking, detailed digital reconstruction runs like a fingertip along remembered images, tracing their nicks. The images feed off a blurred video in which the grandparents and their kitchen-cum-living-room live on – a nostalgic place in the distant Ukraine of childhood.

Four paramedics in a distant mountain village at the beginning of the Covid pandemic go from one house to another, from measurements to diagnoses, from tired older women to drunk middle-aged men. Hreshko watches them closely: They get baptised, married and buried. Yet the ambulance team stays the same, does its job, and ultimately provides the emotional core of this kaleidoscopic view of people’s stories and tragedies.

Amid Russia’s escalating war on Ukraine, the cheerleading team „Nice Ladies,“composed of women over 50, faces a tough test. Team-member Sveta flees to the Netherlands with her family, while her friends Valia and Nadia remain in Kharkiv. The film shows how war permeates everything, yet sport and their sisterhood continue to connect them.

12-year-old Nikita and his family have been staying in an underground station in Kharkiv for weeks. The place promises protection from Russian attacks, but there is not much distraction down here. The glaring lights and provisionally furnished carriages create a surreal to dreary atmosphere, pets roam the aisles, an aging musician plays songs on his guitar.

Ivan Ostrochovský and Pavol Pekarčík condense the first months of the war in Ukraine into an oppressive but not hopeless narrative, because the station is also a place of encounters. Niki soon meets Vika, who is his age and who coaxes the lethargic boy out of his shell. Together they roam the underworld, but while Vika is permitted to go to the surface at least once in a while, Niki’s radius of movement ends at the stairs on which sunlight falls occasionally. And yet an outside exists which the two directors make visible by Super 8 shots scattered in between. They show a damaged Kharkiv: destroyed vehicles, a charred bed, provisionally protected monuments. “Photophobia” is a hybrid, introspective film that manages to find something like tender romance in an unreal situation.

Eva Dzhyshyashvili shows us a family that lives in the mountains following their daily rituals. At first glance, it’s a simple, quiet life unbothered by the outer world. However, as the picture is revealed, we see that the grandfather was wounded in the east of Ukraine and listen to countless conversations about this war. The feeling that there is nowhere to hide from military aggression is starkly evident. But the ending provides a sliver of hope.

A sentimental journey through the main market in Odesa. Pryvoz is a place of recurring myth. It is mentioned in songs and books and is truly the heart of this disorienting city with a complicated history. Neymann looks at the inhabitants with empathy: lost souls in the bodies of humans, dogs or cats. The opera soundtrack adds a sense of fatality to the old vivid market that will become reality. The city of Odesa has been under Russian fire since February 2022.

“Today, we’re raising funds for the 206th Territorial Defence Brigade”, Diva Monroe announces at a drag show in a Kyiv basement club. Whether on the front line or by civilian actions: A lot of people from the Ukrainian LGBTQ+ community are fighting against the Russian attacks – many of them even before the 2022 invasion. It would be understandable to flee from war and discrimination. For a long time, there was next to no social acceptance for queers in the Ukraine. But since Kremlin propaganda no longer reaches Kyiv, things have improved. That is what Olga Gibelinda’s film narrates via the example of three drag queens: Monroe, who remembers the empowerment of the Maidan protests and has worked for television and as an influencer since. Aura, at that time still siding with the pro-Russian government, today serving in the army under Commander-in-Chief Zelensky. And Marlen, who suffered abuse as a trans woman in the past and spreads joy on stage today.
The film establishes a poignant contrast between the show world and the private lives of the drag queens, while leaving space for their political demands. These include the call for the recognition of queer partnerships at this time to give relatives of those killed or wounded in action equal legal claims.

Learning a foreign language is like creating another self. How can you speak it without losing your own sound, without dissolving completely in it – and still be heard and noticed? This film is a charming and intellectually fastidious attempt to navigate the complexities of language, identity and trauma.

To do this, the filmmaker resorts to her own biography. Because Russia invaded Ukraine when Daryna Mamaisur, who comes from Kyiv, was in Portugal for a Doc Nomads graduate course. Home and the search for it became the defining factors of this work, as well as the traumatic situation of only being able to “witness” the difficult situation from a distance. She, the Ukrainian in Portugal, learns Portuguese. She lets the new words for “war,” “explosion” and “attack” roll off her tongue. She compares them with the soft, intimate sound of her native language, with the sound of Kyiv. Friends send audio and visual recordings from Ukraine which, combined with animations, become a multilayered essay and finally a testimony – for the resilience of language and culture, no matter where they are spoken and lived, and not least for the power of the artistic documentary, which can make speech and sound possible.

In the evening of 9 February 2022, four young men sit around a table in Kyiv. The friends are discussing the situation: 120,000 Russian soldiers are stationed right at the Ukrainian border. What is going to happen? In “The Birds Are Silent”, director and cinematographer Leo Dzhyshyashvili captures an equally private and historical moment. What is striking is the clarity with which Andriy, Olexandr, Ivan and Sasha assess the consequences of the imminent attack: Potential decisions about their own future are mixed with concerns about relatives and the bewilderment at being thrown into a situation that provokes both helplessness and disgust. But there is a glimmer of hope – perhaps the imagined horror scenarios are nothing but a waste of energy? Cut. Some of the debaters have become soldiers; one has barricaded himself in the bathroom with a narrow mattress and a meal. Within eight minutes, Dzhyshyashvili has tied together a before and after that make you shudder.