The Painted Bird 2019
A young boy wanders Eastern Europe during World War II.
A young boy wanders Eastern Europe during World War II.
In the rural Ukraine, in a ghostly world where fantasy tears the veil of reality, life fiercely fights death every day and old values and vengeance reign over people's souls, Vitka, an imaginative and rebellious little girl, is the fascinated witness to the crazy love that Larysa, her teenage cousin, feels for Scar, a young criminal.
This film does not deal with Chernobyl, but rather with the world of Chernobyl, about which we know very little. Eyewitness reports have survived: scientists, teachers, journalists, couples, children... They tell of their old daily lives, then of the catastrophe. Their voices form a long, terrible but necessary supplication which traverses borders and stimulates us to question our status quo.
Nina, 30, a Ukrainian language teacher who can't leave the city of Luhansk, occupied by separatists in Eastern Ukraine, is forced to undergo retraining courses for teaching Russian. Andrii, 17, is a student who was orphaned in the aftermath of the war. They cross paths when Nina witnesses Andrii being arrested by the police after hanging the Ukrainian flag from the roof of his school. Nina knows that because they live in a world of injustice and lies Andrii can stay in jail for a long time, and she risks her life to free him. As they gravitate towards each other, they try to remind people in the occupied territories that they deserve a future, too.
Inside the Chornobyl exclusion zone Grandma Prisa, the family matriarch, consorts with water nymphs, eats a diet filled with hallucinogenic mushrooms, and claims to have personally stabbed 12 SS soldiers to death during World War II. She lives together with her divorced and chronically ill daughter Slava and grandson Vova. Unexpectedly, their measured life comes to an end - Grandma Prisa receives a mystical warning about an impending catastrophe.
In 2014 Russia’s hybrid war against Ukraine turns hot. An engineer, actor, soccer coach and florist volunteer to fight on the front line. Unaware of the pivotal role they will play in the war, they discover the meaning of true leadership.
Is truth visible or even a real phenomenon or some transparent shell… A metaphysical etude where the object around which everything happens; around which actors collide and conflicts unfold with no clear outline of events. Only one state exists through which everything else moves - sand.
Ambitious architect Victoria has carefully designed her life. She is bringing up her daughter as a copy of herself and hardly notices anything outside her ideal world. The next step for self-realisation is a project that should bring her long-awaited recognition. But during the inauguration, her daughter disappears. The police are convinced that Alisa is involved in drug trafficking. For help, Victoria is forced to turn to her ex-husband, who works for the police. Their visions of the tragedy differ, and over time Victoria begins to realise how far her daughter has actually drifted away from her. The ideal relationship with her daughter, based on mutual understanding and frankness, is a bubble that bursts. Victoria is confronted with the real world and begins an investigation, although she doesn’t want to lose her reputation as well. In a vacuum of loneliness, under pressure from society and her ex-husband, Victoria risks her life to prove her daughter's innocence.
The director’s granny Zina had lived in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and, after retirement, she moved to Crimea. Cheerful and bossy, she has always been uniting the big family. After the annexation of Crimea by Russia, visiting her has become an endless hustle. The place has turned into ‘a distant planet’, like Mars, and its environment is unfriendly towards the lonely woman. For many reasons, the time has come for her to make a crucial decision.
Theater and film actor, Mykola Veresen' dies on the set while performing the role of Ivan the Terrible. In the moment of death, his karma transforms into the bloody murderer he embodied, and he falls into Sheol, a common grave for all the dead. The time has a different flow here, the only feelings left are fear and pain. In hell Mykola learns about the confrontation that last for centuries between the white and black vampires, he becomes a puppet in the cruel guerrilla of these two supernatural groups.
An absurd story reflecting contemporary social problems in Ukraine, told in the century-old language of cinema, linking modernity and traditional Soviet socialist realism. Classical imagery imitates an old ideology contradicting the author’s worldview revealing the roots of reality’s distortion in this post-Soviet ambience showing that cultural, political and economic problems are knotted in military conflict.
Selling the homestead can be painflully difficult. The hero is forced to confront the past when she tries to complete the sale of her grandfather’s house. In the place of her childhood she finds some answers to questions about life.
The search for a government soldier taken captive on February 20, 2014 in Kyiv takes protester Sashko to the front lines on the East of Ukraine. There he meets Ivan, a Ukrainian volunteer harbouring a secret that could undermine a fragile cease-fire…
Olga's husband were missing on the East Ukraine, in military events. In desperate to find him, Olga comes to the witches, who tell her that her husband died. Emotionally destroyed woman does not want to live without her beloved, the witches offered her to drink infusion of mandrake and "all will be forgotten and sorrow and life will pass." Olga is ready for everything only to subsided her emotional pain, but the ritual is going wrong, events of this world and after-world are woven into a tight knot, when it is impossible to separate life from death.
Alina was abandoned by her mother, so now she lives with her aunt, Alina thinks she is spiteful and doesn't love her. The only one who loves Alina is her doll. Accidentally girl found an announcement about recruiting in a children's dance group 'Vinochok'. This is the chance for Alina to break away of this miserable world, full of dirt uselessness and misunderstanding.
The old man Lyosha and his lady Christie decided to die happily in one day. But Lyosha has to finish something very important first. He does desperate things to implement his secret plan and convince his woman to delay the day of their death.
When the path to safety has been destroyed and you’re forced to abandon your life because the enemy is at the gates, all that’s left to do, is save your home in your heart.
This is a remembrance film featuring the picturesque village of Buchak, Cherkassy region, Ukraine where such prominent directors as Yuri Illenko, Sergey Parajanov, Andrei Tarkovsky, Volodymyr Denysenko and others shot their films in the 1950s - 1970s. The film is based on reminiscences by members of film crews and residents of Buchak village.