With a pre-recorded introduction by the director

Wheelchair accessible* | In Ukrainian, English, and Russian; with English and descriptive subtitles
£11.50 (concession) / £13.00 (full price)

If the ticket or other costs, such as childcare or transport, make this screening unaffordable, please see details of our Audience Access Fund.

The VHS camera sparked a revolution in personal archiving and historiography and entered late Soviet reality first as a rarity and a luxury, right on the brink of collapse and transition. Maria Stoianova's father, Mykhailo, a dancer with the Ukrainian Ballet on Ice, bought his in 1986, the same year Maria was born, and began filming the mythical outside world of his tours abroad for those who never had the chance to see it themselves. Ordinary life back home in Kyiv, small family rituals and celebrations, his daughter's growing up feature in his footage just as much.

What started in 2018 as family archaeology through her father's archive grew into an essay documentary tracing Ukraine's late-Soviet years, its path to independence, and its imaginaries of the future through one household's fragmented personal chronicle. 

The dark presence of the consequences of russian imperialism and colonial violence comes through in little details and routine conversations. Elaborate traditional costumes and unmistakably Ukrainian music don't save the ballet artists from being perceived through colonial monopoly on narrative, sold on export to the West. They still have to explain themselves, explain Ukraine, its sovereignty, its right to exist. What might have felt like an inevitable part of the liberatory process at the start looks heartbreaking from the distance of years, from wartime, where so many Ukrainians in exile still have to do the same thing, and so many on the frontline and in the rear keep getting killed in a colonial war. So did that transition ever end? Did the West manage to hear and accept the East?

The film is dedicated to editor Viktor Onysko, who left the project in 2022 to join the Ukrainian army and was killed at the frontline that December.

Screening preceded by a film from the Shorts Competition, Self-Preserving Nudity / Я не зникаю (Nelly Shylova, 2026): Saving her children from the horrors of the russian invasion, a Ukrainian woman finds herself in a gentle Irish purgatory of festive lights and crowded pubs, suspended between reality and dream. Self-Preserving Nudity explores exile, trauma, and survival, framing displacement as a quiet form of death through poetic documentary language.

Content notes: archival VHS footage, loud noises

Access notes: colonialism, grief, economic hardship

Curated by Natalia Guzevataya