Documentary
The documentary film ANCESTRAL CODE is a research into the origins of the Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples, the search for their identity through the study of the melodism of Slavic ethnographic heritage. Nowadays many people talk about brotherhood, spiritual intimacy, affinity.…
No cast information available.
In the polyphony of voices, a search for home unfolds. What is home? What is its purpose? Is there anything bigger than home? What are the sounds, colours, and smells that let it live in our memory? The collective and the individual is expressed through the voices of those who lost it in the Russian war in Ukraine. Associations, memories, meanings: four letters, four hundred things between them — home.
The film’s story is based on the fate of the Floriculture Pavilion of the former Exhibition of Achievements of the People’s Economy, and its elderly employee Valentyna Voronina, who maintains this space, investing her own life into it, until suddenly changes come to her. After forty-five years of work, she is asked to retire. But Voronina does not agree with that, because she thinks that all the plants will die without her. Meanwhile, a group of mysterious radioesthesists find a channel of positive energy right in front of the entrance to the pavilion.
Throughout time, Eastern Ukraine (such as Donbas) has been referred to as a 'Russian world', but this is indeed not the case. The history of Donbas was re-written during the Soviet era. Although the Soviet Union edited out and withheld all references to the European background of this region from history books in schools and universities. There were, in fact, numerous French, Belgian, German, British, Polish, Swiss, Dutch, and even American settlements and more than 100 wide-scale enterprises in the region. Therefore, this film reveals the pro-European industrialization of Ukrainian Donbas at the turn of the 19th century. It aims to emphasize the European roots of Ukraine long before the official integration process of Ukraine into the EU in 2022.
Wolves divide and fascinate us. 150 years after they were driven to extinction in Central Europe, they are returning slowly but inexorably. Are they dangerous to humans? Is it possible to coexist? Using Switzerland as a point of departure, where wolves have returned in the very recent past, this documentary sheds light on the wolf situation in Austria, eastern Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, and even Minnesota, where freely roaming packs of wolves are more common sight.
A meditation on the time when the world watched as filmmaker Jonas Mekas' home country of Lithuania fought for independence. An immersion into the addictive grasp of the 24-hour news cycle, into a moment of major social upheaval, and into one very personal fixation of an obsessive chronicler. The film exists in a shortened, four-screen version as well as a one-screen, full-length document.
A chronicle of the civil uprising against the regime of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych that took place in Kyiv in the winter of 2013/14. The film follows the progress of the revolution: from peaceful rallies, half a million strong in the Maidan square, to the bloody street battles between protesters and riot police.
