Queer Cinema: International – Fokus Ukraine II

The research film “The Wonderful Years” tells stories of women dealing with heterosexuality in late Soviet Ukraine. The film is based on the archive video materials and interview excerpts from three research projects.

The Secret, The Girl and The Boy was shot in a course of one day in Tatarka neighborhood, Kyiv, Ukraine. The neighborhood is a hilly territory, part of which is summer houses and gardens. The garden The Girl and The Boy play in is an abandoned one. They have time and space to experience certain behaviors out of its’ usual order.

‘The Film of Sand’ is an auto-fictional essay about a gay community that makes use of a communication network consisting of amateur radio and grassroot hook-up apps. While the air is constantly interrupted by homophobic messages made of the intercepted military ciphers used by the Russian army, networks of love, empathy, and support become ever stronger. Produced as a close observation of everyday media practices and the social life of love relations, The Film of Sand takes a close look at the interrelations of war and intimacy, threat and empathy, fiction and documentation.

A film about the relationships of humans and trees. An attempt to question human gaze upon nature, recognize subjectivity of a tree and approach its radical otherness.
We look into the case of fifteen “winners” of the National Trees of Ukraine competition and explore the image of a tree as reflected in the language of legislation, journalism and poetry.

Director Zoya Laktionova talks about her 2 months of experience abroad in a state of two realities. Her documentary essay interacts with two landscapes in the same space of the video work. The work uses archival family photos of the artist and texts written in the first weeks of the war. The work absorbs one landscape into another, but it is difficult to understand what kind of landscape this act carries out.

An abandoned house on the sea coast, an overcast sky and a camera shared by 3 friends.