Ukraine cinema

The film opens with a simple shot of the sky. Although the image is in black and white, it’s clear that we’re looking at a blue mid-summer day.

The 75th Cannes International Film Festival is over. While the festival celebrates the return to relative normalcy following a global pandemic, there is a new global threat just three hours away from the sunny beaches of the Cote d’Azur—Putin’s devastating war in Ukraine.

What a strange time we live in - in a world where the Cote d’Azur is abuzz with the 75th Cannes International Film Festival three hours away from a full-fledged war. Every day, movie stars from around the world present themselves on the red carpet in luxury clothing.

A life between greatest triumph and deepest loss. Oksana Baiul was a mere 16 when she won the Olympic gold medal for figure skating in Lillehammer 1994, the first Ukrainian athlete to do so.

February 21 changed everything for Ukrainian actress Oksana Cherkashyna. Having screened Maryna Er Gorbach’s powerful film Klondike at the prestigious film festivals Sundance and Berlin, she was hoping that an invasion of her home  country Ukraine was not going to be a reality.

Like their fellow countrymen, Ukrainian filmmakers have been defiant in their protest against Russia’s invasions of their country over the past decade or so. The recent war, which began on February 24 and is still raging, is the latest turbulent chapter in the relationship between the two countries.

Nariman Aliev’s Homeward premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019 in Un the Certain Regard series. It marked the debut of a gifted first-time director, who was only 26 years old.

As the world holds its breath watching Russia continue its assault on Ukraine, Ukrainian filmmaker Iryna Tsilyk talks to the Golden Globes Around the World podcast series about her gut-wrenching experience of discovering life imitating art. The up-and-coming filmmaker won Best Director in the 2020 Sundance Film Festival World Cinema Documentary Category for The Earth is Blue as an Orange, following a single mother and her four children trying to live a normal life in the war zone of southern and eastern Ukraine that began eight years ago when Russia annexed Crimea.

In 2014, Sergei Loznitsa, one of Ukraine's most prominent filmmakers, directed Maidan, a powerful documentary focusing on the Euromaidan movement of 2013 and 2014 in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Ukraine's capital Kyiv. As is well known, the Euromaidan movement has advocated political freedom, civil and human rights, and closer ties with the West (with or without affiliation with NATO).

“Wake up, my sunshine. The war has just begun,” a young mother named Irina told her ten-month-old son at six in the morning.