A Farewell to Cinema depicts the axing of state subsidies to the local film industry as Hollywood flicks swamped Ukrainian cinemas, and former film professionals forced to pick random jobs to make a miserable living, struggling to keep their dignity and film heritage from the amnesiac fury of neoliberal diktats. In this precious film, we get a rare glimpse into what exactly was entailed throughout the Eastern Bloc in the passage from ‘Real socialism’ to democracy, in what Soviet dissident Alexander Zinoviev aptly re-named ‘Catastroika’.

The film documents the various mass public protests that took place in Kyiv during the last years of ‘perestroika’ and the first year of independence. The first scenes document the rise of mass democratic protests in Kyiv, principally the People’s Movement of Ukraine and its public actions, which were mostly nationalist in nature. However, during 1991, together with the birth of an independent Ukraine, the situation changed drastically – social frustration grew, the street events became more radical and socially motivated, and shortly turned into apathetic anger at the new social order.

In the Volyn region, in the monastery of XVI century, an old people’s home is located. However, mental patients and former criminals also live there… The authors seem to fix everyday life only, watching its drift. But we see a metaphor of the socialist system of values, declared by the local manager – either Elsa Koch or “Beria in a skirt”: “Socializm is accounting! You have done a good deed – write it down!”

For over ten years, Kyiv artists Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Melnychenko have been working on the project of the Park of Memory at Baykovy Hill in Kyiv. Next to the world-famous building of the Halls of Farewell at Kyiv crematorium (architect Avraam Miletsky), Rybachuk and Melnychenko created a series of monumental, unique sculptures over 2000 square meters in size, which represented various key tragedies from the history of mankind. However, at the beginning of 1982, the local authorities decided to cancel the work on the Wall, and to pour concrete over several hundred square meters of ready sculptures. This decision was one of the largest-scale acts of art censorship in the USSR.

The debut film by Serhiy Bukovsky, created at the Ukrainian documentary film studio, gave birth to a new critical wave of Ukrainian non-fiction films. Having received a request to create a film with a seemingly hopeless topic, which has long been overused by Soviet propaganda – the life of a provincial poultry plant – Bukovsky unexpectedly created a film about the deep social crisis of Soviet society. Instead of the typical presentation of socialist work, the film demonstrates the day-to-day dead-end lives of Soviet working women, whose social status strips them of any prospects for a better life.

We hear readings from Dovzhenko's diary and hear how the great suffering of the Ukrainian people caused him to move away from beauty for its own sake to the search for truth, expressed in his two harrowing wartime documentaries. Stalin's 1944 ban on Dovzhenko's Ukraine in Flames screenplay and his subsequent exile to Moscow had a profound impact on him.

Self-portrait film: the author documents himself and his own vision of the world and nature around him to give the viewer this perspective and to encourage them to be attentive to what surrounds us. For the phonogram, the author compiled the music by composer Jean-Michel Jarre and his own recordings of the sounds of nature, which he made especially for the tape.

An epic comedy about a cyclist and doping, where the author involved his comrades and neighbors. Despite the entertaining nature, we had to work on the tape to carefully prepare and think through the script, props, and shooting locations. The film is complemented by new music written by Regina Zheleznyakova (Regina Collage).

This is the author's first film. It records careful observation of changes in the life cycles of flora and fauna that occur in the garden near his house in Vynnyky. The structure of the film is based on the change of seasons. Accordingly, filming and work lasted all year round. Originally, the tape was silent. In 2020, Regina Zheleznyakova (Regina Collage) and Pavlo Olefirenko (Pilikayu) wrote music for it.

Two Soviet boys go to Africa to free the black girl Kane from captivity. Overcoming difficulties and obstacles, they wrest Kane from the grip of the oppressor-colonizer.

The story is about a chick who lives behind a fence on a farm and conducts a choir of the other chicks. After meeting a self-important turkey, the chick also becomes conceited and decides to make his name in the world outside the chicken coop. After being nearly killed by birds, fish, and a cat, he returns home chastened and decides to stay where he is.

On the 24th of February, in the morning, my boyfriend and I decided to go from Kyiv to Irpin to his parents. It is hard for me to recall the chronology of those days, my mind blocks and undervalues all the memories, erases them, but the only thing I know for sure is that every day everything rapidly became worse. We were there for 10 days, sleeping in the basement, hiding from bombings, totally isolated. I wanted to get out, my boyfriend’s parents insisted on staying. In the end, we managed to escape with the last green corridor hours before Russian troops finally entered the city. Time passed, but the feeling that I died in Irpin never left me since then. The film reconstructs this true story of survival through a personal and subjective lens.

Claudia Alemann's film documents the general strike and student mass protests in Paris in 1968. As a participant in various film collectives, she also examines the role of the medium of film in times of political and social upheaval and the impact of changing cultural-political paradigms on artistic activity. Alemann allows workers, students, teachers and filmmakers to have their say.

In 1900, an ambitious young man goes to Paris to make a fortune there. He will naturally get rich but by becoming a dreaded bandit. When he falls in love with the woman of his life, he tries to reform. To this end, he joins the colonial army.

The first film in the history of cinema to dare to address the problem of cockroaches from the perspective of religion and sexuality.

Braling is delightedly browsing through a book of reproductions of the Tahiti paintings by Paul Gauguin. His good-looking wife Lucy is putting on her makeup in front of the mirror. They are meant to be going to a party, but the husband is making excuses. Lucy is sarcastic about his yearning for an exotic island and reminds him that the reason they are going to the party is her father, who is also her husband's boss. Braling gives in, and the two leave the flat, but the man appears to come back very soon. It becomes clear that the wife was escorted to the party by a robot, secretly purchased by the husband, especially for such occasions.

Two angels, God's messengers, who, however, look more like astronauts, visit Lot and, using their transmitters, warn him about the destruction of the city of Sodom and tell him to take his family and leave, as he is the only rightful person in the town. Although Lot constantly criticizes and warns his fellows, he still feels to be one of them and struggles to save them.

A movie director attemps to film the way he writes a screenplay

A teenage boy is sent away from home by his strict father to learn how to shudder and ends up several nights in a haunted castle.

A short documentary about the citizens of Orly and their problems with the noise pollution caused by the airport.

A German stop-motion adaptation of Sleeping Beauty.

Vasia, the son of a factory worker, is attracted by the romance of adventure. And he goes to look for them. He saves a drowning drunk who tries to beat him. Vasia escapes from him in a vehicle parked on the shore. However, the vehicle belongs to a superintendent who, when he does not find it, stages its theft. Meanwhile, Vasia exposes priests in the church. As a result, the church is turned into a cinema, and the priest becomes a cinema technician. And finally, Vasia's last deed is catching a criminal and denouncing him to the militia.

A mother lives in a trailer in the woods with her daughters Emily and Kandi. After Emily and Kandi are abducted by a nefarious group of pirates who reside in an empty swimming pool, the mother must embark on a perilous journey into the dangerous forest in order to save them. The mother encounters singing transvestites, a lesbian gang, a sect of homosexual monks, and a helpful dwarf named Derek on her trek to find her daughters.

In the slow, sticky summer of late-90s Eastern Europe, twelve-year-old Ro sets out to procure a pirated copy of Eraserhead by David Lynch. Her journey—through crumbling friendships, stolen cigarettes, and VHS-era power games—unfolds in a world where childhood slips quietly into something else, and cinema becomes the only available glimpse of escape.

December 1999. I remember that, amidst the Millennium Bug anxiety, I went to the birthday of Enrico, a kid who lived with his family in an old and isolated farmhouse.

A grandfather tells his grandson a bedtime story about the ancient Narts.