This year's DOCU/SHORT selection process departed from our usual strategy of seeking short stories from around the world. Instead, this competition programme brings together stories that had to be told from abroad and films made by artists who stayed at home, in Ukraine. Darya Levchenko, the programme coordinator, shares her thoughts about this year's DOCU/SHORT selection:
"The DOCU/SHORT UA short film competition programme showcases a ‘rapid response’ reaction that captures the pain familiar to everyone in Ukraine. It is about our everyday lives, overloaded with anxious questions like ‘How are you?’, about the search for oneself in the past which is as yet uncomprehended, and about blind attempts to find an image of the future in order to survive against all the odds.
The 20th anniversary of Docudays UA will take place for the second time during the full-scale invasion, and for the ninth time during the Russian war against Ukraine. We don't want the artistic archive of the war to be replenished with new stories that can’t be unseen: from Mariupol, Chornobyl, Kyiv oblast, Chernihiv, and the rest of our unconquered country. We wish to keep the memory of Ukrainian families scattered all over the world as a fact of the past, and not as an unfinished, continuing process. We want the stories of reconstruction and reunification to be more recognisable than the subtle personal losses and the great bloody wound of war, which hurts differently in a shared body of 42 million people.
In an unspeakable reality, the DOCU/SHORT programme is a space for an honest conversation within Ukrainian society about the war that divided us, the war that brought us closer."
The DOCU/SHORT UA short film competition includes:
The biggest part of films from the DOCU/SHORT programme will be available to watch at the DOCUSPACE online cinema.
Main photo: a still from the film The Mist.
