Ukraine New Cinema Festival–Symposium Shorts Program

Saturday, March 28, 4:30–6:30 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ), L01
Yale University

This curated program of contemporary Ukrainian short films brings together documentary, animation, and experimental works responding to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Moving between occupied territories, besieged cities, and intimate private spaces, the films explore how individuals confront war through memory, artistic practice, and the routines of everyday life. Together they offer a glimpse into Ukraine’s independent filmmaking scene, where documentary observation, animation, and personal storytelling become ways of registering and reflecting on life during wartime.

Chornobyl 22 (2023)

Director: Oleksiy Radynski
Ukraine | Documentary | 2023 | 20 min

Radynski’s documentary brings viewers inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone during the first weeks of Russia’s invasion in 2022, when the site was seized by Russian troops. Nuclear plant workers suddenly found themselves working under military occupation while continuing to maintain one of the most technologically sensitive sites in Europe. By returning to a location long associated with the 1986 disaster, the film reframes Chornobyl as a landscape where Soviet history, environmental catastrophe, and contemporary war collide.

Mariupol. A Hundred Nights (2023)

Director: Sofiia Melnyk
Ukraine / Germany | Animation | 2023 | 9 min

This animated short reflects on the siege of Mariupol through the perspective of a young girl. Using animation as a visual language of memory and metaphor, the film evokes the psychological experience of war: fragmented time, shifting spaces of safety, and the fragile interior world of childhood. The stylized imagery transforms documentary reality into an intimate narrative about survival and imagination.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/7YlUT11Vh8E?si=x7mOfTh1JQUegE7V
 

Kyiv Cake (2025)
Director: Mykyta Lyskov
Estonia / Ukraine | Animated short | 22–23 min

Mykyta Lyskov’s Kyiv Cake is a surreal and bitterly funny portrait of life in modern Ukraine. Moving through the years 2014–2026, the film follows a family under pressure from poverty, war, and historical upheaval, using absurdist imagery to register both private vulnerability and collective endurance. The film won the Grand Prix in the Ukrainian competition at the 2025 Kyiv International Short Film Festival.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/bJ1t-cyqpsw?si=u-yGvhdSTrz-rK0z

Mokosh (2023)
Director: Anna Dudko
Ukraine / Austria | Animated short | 4:45–5 min

Anna Dudko’s Mokosh draws on the figure of the Slavic earth goddess to imagine destruction and renewal in wartime. The film’s images are spare and mythic: the sun breaks apart, hard times arrive, and out of devastation emerges the possibility of another cycle of life. The short is dedicated to women who endured sexual violence under occupation, giving its symbolic language a clear moral and historical force.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/cf_pyofc9J8?si=uuQuiVYHsPNs-gbd

My Closet (2023)
Director: Iuliia Kotsiuba
Ukraine | Animation | 3 min 39 sec

Under tragic circumstances, a young woman is forced to separate from her husband. While continuing her daily routines and maintaining contact with the man she loves, she struggles to overcome fear and despair. As uncertainty grows and communication becomes fragile, the film asks whether emotional connection can survive when distance and loss threaten to sever it.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/UPvsZqdwzV4?si=WInP9TlH2Q8fdQxn
 

Co-sponsored by:
Yale Ukrainian Program · Yale Ukraine House · Slavic Department · The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund · Razom for Ukraine · Yale MacMillan Center Program in Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies · European Studies Council · Film & Media Studies · Yale Film Society · Penn State University