CW#2 l SEASON 3 l Sketches of Eastern Ukraine

Theme: Solidarity

1 March 2023, Wednesday | Season 3, Episode 2

Apartment Project and online

 

Livestream link: https://youtube.com/live/BEueD0CAstM

Organized by the Apartment Project Berlin and funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe

 

Sketches of Eastern Ukraine

 

«Searching for meanings until February 2022

Life after February 2022»

 

20.00 Screening of films by Filmmakers, followed by a Q&A session with Iryna Berezneva (co-founder of Freefilmers), moderated by Şirin Erensoy

 

 

As an expression of solidarity with Ukrainians, «Chromatic Wednesdays» invites Freefilmers to its upcoming episode. The collective from Mariupol will present three of their short films reflecting eastern Ukrainian cities before and since the Russian invasion in 2022. The screenings will be followed by a Q&A session with Freefilmers co-founder Iryna Berezneva.

 

«Вы шо, тут металл воруете? (Відновлення простору)» / «Revitalization of space» (2018, 25 min) by Sasha Protyah & Oksana Kazmina

 

The film team of the Creative East project travels through eastern Ukrainian cities to explore abandoned areas and buildings. The people they meet offer different perspectives on the places they often find abandoned, but which have sometimes been, for example, revitalized through rave parties, transformed through temporary art interventions or turned into a skate park.

 

«Шо шо? (Східноукраїнський діалог)» / «Eastern Ukrainian dialogue» (2018, 25 min) by Sasha Protyah & Oksana Kazmina

 

The film examines the issues and possibilities of building cultural dialogue in eastern Ukrainian cities. The film crew analyzes the multicultural history of the region, the difficulties of expressing one’s culture and attempts to establish a cross-regional dialogue. The film aims to create space for expressing different points of view on the cultures of the eastern region of Ukraine, rather than giving ready-made answers.

 

«My favorite job» (2022, 32 min) by Sasha Protyah

 

Since Russian troops surrounded the Ukrainian city of Mariupol in the spring 2022, the civilian population has been exposed to Russian military action. Therefore, volunteers started evacuating people from Mariupol to Zaporizhzhia in mid-March 2022. The film shows the risky daily work of the volunteers: they meet after each trip to share information, support each other and talk about their traumatic experiences.

 

Freefilmers is a cinemovement and NGO from Mariupol in East Ukraine founded by Sasha Protyah and Iryna Berezneva and including Oksana Kazminka, Yulia Serdyukova and Natasha Tseliubavtsov. They are a collective of filmmakers and artists, originally from Mariupol and now based in different parts of the world. For the past five years, they have been working with topics of urban transformations in the region of eastern Ukraine and its multicultural vibes. Their research also includes a focus on the working-class creativity and industrial past and present of post-socialist cities. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, however, their main focus has shifted to building a network of solidarity and support for Ukrainians who are suffering from and fighting against the Russian aggression.

«Chromatic Wednesdays» is a bi-weekly event series bringing together creative thinkers across diverse backgrounds. As part of this interdisciplinary program, the film screenings will be presented at 20.00 (doors open at 19.30) at Apartment Project (Hertzbergstraße 13, 12055 Berlin) and can also be followed online on Youtube (https://youtube.com/live/BEueD0CAstM).