SECTION: Spotlight: Ukraine

Ukrainian cinema continues to be one of the most creativefilm landscapes in Europe. With Spotlight: Ukraine, the FFC is putting Ukrainian cinema in the spotlight for the third time since 2016. But Ukraine's presence is also an integral part of the FFC programme in other sections: in the Competition, in the Spectrum and in EcoEast.

On the Saturday of the festival, the "Ukrainian Day" offers the opportunity to "look through" Ukrainian films from early in the morning until late in the evening; Ukrainian refugees are given the opportunity to attend screenings of the entire FFC programme on this day without paying an admission fee. A panel discussion on 10.11. will discuss how filmmakers from Ukraine deal with the challenges - threatened by enemy fire, themselves as soldiers at the front, confronted with considerable logistical and financial constraints and emotional challenges that can hardly be put into words. 

The Ukrainian feature films and documentaries at this year's FFC show how Ukrainian filmmakers deal with their everyday life in a permanent state of emergency, how young Ukrainians try to live a somehow "normal" everyday life despite the war, with all its usual fractures between coming-of-age and homophobia, mother-daughter relationship, cultural heritage and criminal case. And the threats, fears and crimes of a war you thought would never happen again. In a life in which they are confronted with enormous psychological stress that could foreseeably lead to widespread collective traumatisation of society.

The presence of Ukrainian films at the FFC shows how broad the range of topics is that filmmakers from the country plagued by the Russian war of aggression deal with - and how relevant their films are also outside the country whose everyday life and soul they illuminate in depth and with a mixture of investigative ambition and willpower, sadness and - that too - lightness.