UA SHORTS. URBAN LEGACIES
ENTER THROUGH THE BALCONY 26’ Roman Blazhan Ukraine 2019
Enter Through The Balcony is a short documentary about makeshift balconies in Ukraine. The film explores the balcony as an informal architectural form that is uniquely Ukrainian. It is a journey through the decades, examining both balconies and their owners in cities across Ukraine.
KACHALKA 9’ Gar O’Rourke Ireland 2019
A journey into the heart of what is widely considered the world’s most hardcore gym – Kiev’s enormous open-air “Kachalka” gym. This observational style film follows the gym's caretaker as he takes us through the enormous scrap-metal site, allowing a glimpse into the workouts of various other local gym goers along the way.
LANDSLIDE 28’ Oleksіy Radynskyy Ukraine 2017
Landslide represents post-revolutionary Ukraine through the community of people who ‘try to build a new society’ in the cracks and pores of a collapsing social system. The film unfolds in a space that has been reclaimed from the city by forces of nature – in the very centre of Ukrainian capital Kiev. As a result of a series of landslides, this space has become untenable and was subsequently occupied by the outcasts and outsiders of all kinds. It's now alo an important meeting spot for counterculture and artistic underground. A secretive graffiti team, a group of DIY-geeks and an avant-garde gay theatre that fled the war in Luhansk all struggle to create a place where they could coexist outside the pressure of dysfunctional social structures.
DESATURATED 9’ Maryna Stepanska Ukraine 2019
“Desaturated” is a 10-minute visual comedy. The comedic value of the film is built on the fact that the character knows that she is a character in a film, and is trying to overcome the visual clichés without which we cannot imagine modern cinema. The main conflict of the character is in her having a colour that is different from the general colour treatment of the film. In 9 minutes, the character must bring everything to the same colour palette.
The film is set in realist Lviv, with a focus on the visual colour conflict of modern Lviv (old architecture that is chaotically painted in bright colours.
In the center of city Dnipro, Ukraine, during the 50 years abandoned hotel ‘PARUS’ (SAIL) is existing. It had to become the symbol of the grandiosity of Dnipropetrovsk as the homeland of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. However, it has never been opened — the construction stopped on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
From the 2000 the PARUS has been depicted like a finished building on calendars, in memes, in art-projects and visualizations. For a lot of people in Dnipro it is already the symbol of the city, although it is unfinished.
CONCRETE AND UNCLEAR 31’ Lera Malchenko, Oleksandr Hants Ukraine 2019
BROKEN HISTORY 1’ Belen Resnikowski Germany 2019
How to create history through the denial of it, the process of decommunisation in Ukraine has created different types of wounds, art and architecture have been the first to suffer these changes and become objects of oblivion, the animation expresses this discrepancy between modern society and the pieces of forgotten history.