Focus | Ukrainian Women in Film | KKC
This program brings together five short films by Ukrainian women directors that center female experience within the shifting realities of present-day Ukraine. Working across fiction and animation, the filmmakers approach questions of identity, intimacy, displacement, and self-determination with precision and emotional clarity.
Taken together, these films do not present a single narrative of womanhood. Instead, they offer a range of perspectives shaped by different ages, contexts, and artistic approaches. What unites them is a commitment to placing women’s voices at the center — attentive to everyday experience while remaining conscious of the broader political and social conditions in which these lives unfold.
Programme curators - Sasha Prokopenko & Olga Gusiatynska
Films
Kittens / UA / 8'
Two girls in a Lviv apartment start a casual conversation about their common future. In the midst of the traditional Ukrainian life remnants, the usual dreams about the future stumble upon the unbreakable social norms and customs.
In Joy / UA / 26'
Katya is a young single mother. She falls in love with a guy but hesitates to tell him that she has a son. The relationship is rapidly evolving, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to confess.
Kira / UA / 27'
When the full-scale invasion begins, Kira can't get away from her internal fever - she has to go to the frontline. She is 28 and she is a veterinarian, so it is just natural for her to become a paramedic. But there is one "but" - her twelve-year-old son, Vitia, whom Kira is raising alone.
I died in Irpin / UA / 11'
On February 24th in the morning my boyfriend and I decided to go from Kyiv to Irpin to see his parents. It is hard for me to recall the chronology of those days, my mind blocks and minimizes all the memories, erases them, but the only thing I know for sure is that every day everything rapidly became worse.
Prelude / UA / 14'
While cruising through the nocturnal streets of Kyiv, Anna, a woman who stops and films passing men, unexpectedly encounters a soldier. They start to discuss the men she observed.