UCF | Cinema | KISFF Shorts - Contours of Ukraine

Together with the Kyiv International Short Film Festival, we are presenting a program featuring emerging Ukrainian filmmakers.

This program is an attempt to reflect on our connection to home. Here, Ukraine emerges not only as a territory but as a metaphysical space that unites us culturally, historically, and politically. These films explore how, suspended in temporality and fragility, we rediscover and expand the notion of home – growing from the size of a room to encompass the whole of Ukraine, becoming a space of memory, struggle, and shared responsibility.

The film screening will be followed by a Q&A with the program director of Kyiv International Short Film Festival, Sasha Prokopenko.

Time: Doors open at 6:30 p.m. EST, the screening will begin at 7 p.m.

Location: QUAD Cinema (34 West 13th St., NY, NY, 10011)

Note: The film will be screened in Ukrainian with English subtitles.

Info: In one of the few bakeries in Kyiv, people with mental disabilities make bread. Along with their own challenges, they have to live through the experience of war. However, their daily work saves the locals on frontline territories, which are under constant shelling by Russian forces, from the food crisis. Though strangers, they are united by bread, which acts as a guide on this journey from baking, packaging, and delivering to those who need it most. The final stop: New York, a Ukrainian village in Donetsk region, now occupied by Russia.

Info: An elite Kyiv Naval Political College functions in a city without access to the sea. The first Soviet aircraft carrier, Kyiv, became the flagship of the Northern Fleet. The school's students, future political officers of the Soviet navy, go on a long navigation voyage while at the place of their alma mater opens a Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Focusing on the history of the changing ideological function of the institution, Under the Sign of Anchor explores the complex and sometimes paradoxical connections between war and culture, the Soviet past and the present. The film is based on materials from film archives from the time of the collapse of the USSR and the first years of Ukraine's independence.

Info: Inspired by the events around the life of Lev Rebet, Ukrainian author and editor-in-chief of the Munich-based exile newspaper Ukrainian Independist, the film portrays the fates of the Ukrainian diaspora in the past and present.

Info: Maria, who was forced to leave Ukraine, seeks a female roommate in Budapest. Talks with potential neighbors about food habits and cleanliness transition into conversations about the feeling of home and loneliness. And when Ukrainian girls visit Maria, the search for a neighbor turns into an exchange of thoughts about the war and forced displacement.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th Street, New York, United States