Ukrainian documentary cinema prides itself on a long tradition of poetic camera work, engaging observation, and expressive editing. The selection includes four recent films that allow the viewers to explore the country’s past and present, travel through time and space from urban to rural sites and from Eastern to Western parts of the country. Oleksiy Radynski’s sensitive portrait of a renowned architect zooms on the hot debate unfolding around his landmark construction - “flying saucer” concert hall in Kyiv, which becomes the object of developers’ manipulation (Infinity According to Florian). Dmytro Hreshko’s Mountains and Heaven in Between transports the viewers to the picturesque Carpathian mountains, showing how the medics push themselves to the limits during the covid pandemic to protect the local community while the latter is unwilling to give up on their daily routines. Boney Piles takes us to Eastern Ukraine to show the lives of two children, struggling to find meaning to their lives just a few hundred meters away from the frontline. Igor Ivanko explores his own family past as well as the history of famous Odesa film studio in Fragile Memories, mining the past of his grandfather Leonid Burlaka, a famous Ukrainian Soviet cinematographer who preserves a wealth of stories and his dignity while struggling with Alzheimer.
The section is prepared in cooperation with Docudays UA.
Mantas Kvedaravičius (1976–2022) was born in Biržai, Lithuania. He earned a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge, and made his first documentary on the disappeared in Chechnya and their families (Barzakh, 2011). In 2016 he completed Mariupolis, a searing portrait of the southern port city at the frontline, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2016, and screened at Verzió that same year. In an interview with the Odessa Review, Kvedaravičius said that he had wanted to capture “how regular people carry on with their everyday lives mere steps away from a war zone, gunshots, explosions, and death.” In 2022, following Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine, he returned to Mariupolis to film the people he had met in 2015, and to report about their everyday survival during the war. On 9 April 2022, Mantas Kvedaravičius was killed in the besieged city. His body was recovered and returned to his native Lithuania.
Mariupolis and Mariupolis 2 will be screened in memory of this fearless filmmaker who was committed to communicating the most visceral and profound experiences of affect and pain to audiences. He used his camera to testify to and empathize with the experiences of victims and survivors.
