A family of Ukrainian documentary filmmakers is forced to leave their homeland after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. To protect their three children from shelling, they travel across Europe and eventually settle in Britain. The camera, once part of their professional lives, becomes a way of holding on to a family reality that is shifting faster than they can understand.
The film follows this upheaval mainly through the children: Agatha, Yaryna and Luka. They grow quickly, absorbing the language, music, food and habits of a new country. Koliada gives way to Halloween. Borshch is replaced by toast and jam. Nursery, school, uniforms, routines, discipline and new rules slowly reshape their days. Birthdays pass. Christmases and New Years arrive in a foreign country. The children make wishes: for Ukraine’s victory, for a return home, for a house they will build one day — with a slide from the bedroom down into the living room.
Built from present-day observation, family archive, children’s videos, drawings and conversations, My Shadows Grow Faster Than Me is an intimate film about exile, childhood and the slow transformation of identity. It asks whether home is a place, a language, a body of memories, or a decision one has to keep making. The family longs to return. To a country still under attack, to parents and friends, to culture, language and a sense of inner coherence — but also to danger. The film follows this unresolved movement between safety and belonging, asking whether identity can sometimes become more urgent than security.
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