Several years ago, we could only dream that there would be such a selection of Ukrainian documentaries as presented in this year's Docudays UA program. Works by Ukrainian directors are presented in all the three competition programs, as well as in the traditional DOCU/UKRAINE panorama. 

The films are completely diverse in style and genre. From the almost epic to the very personal.

The debutants Alisa Kovalenko and Lyuba Durakova seem to have been fighting for the chance to make their film Sister Zo for four years. For more than six years, Ostap Kostyuk and his team have been shooting his testimony about the disappearing world of the last Carpathian shepherds. Finally, we have the opportunity to see Living Fire, filmed magically by Oleksandr Pozdnyakov and Nikita Kuzmenko.

I should point out that the Ukrainian premiere of Vagrich and the Black Square by Andrey Zagdanski will be held during the festival, a film dedicated to Vagrich Bahchanyan, the master of words. This is a film-essay, a film collage, whose path to the audience has taken almost ten years. I think the history of this film largely overlaps with the fate of the hero. Maybe because the director, just like Vagrich, is unable to compromise in art.

The directors have not neglected the major events the country is going through. What was the year after the Revolution of Dignity like? What did it change in the lives of the films’ characters, and in every one of us? Perhaps all the films from the Ukrainian collection of the festival are worth preserving as documentary evidence of the time. Most of the films presented at Docudays UA were born from a call of the heart, sometimes without any support, sometimes requiring extraordinary courage from the authors. This suggests that, to the contemporary generation of Ukrainian artists, documentary is not a way of earning money and not a workplace. It is a way of thinking and communicating with the world.

Hennadiy Kofman, program director of the Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival