NO TIME LIKE HOME

With its fourth festival edition, the Ukrainian Film Festival Berlin invites its audience to explore together the concept of "home", its spacial and temporal dimensions through Ukrainian cinema.Homeland and home are not static concepts. Their perception and meaning are constantly changing and shifting dynamically in our challenging times. The loss of home, ongoing threats to the home place and migration challenge today's generation of Ukrainian filmmakers even more to reinvent their image of home and to question home as a geographical constant. Is home a geographical experience or rather a time experienced and shared with others?The search for temporal and spatial meanings of home as well as questions of one's own origin and belonging determine this year's festival program of the 4th Ukrainian Film Festival Berlin. Be it personal film stories of directors who fled the war and arrived in Berlin, or cinematic explorations of the 1990s in Ukraine, where most of the contemporary Ukrainian filmmakers grew up."Together we want to explore the temporal aspect/dimension of home/homeland and make visible its ever-changing meanings throughout history and in our fragile/unstable present." - comments the festival curators on their festival motto for this year.The festival will present/screen, among others, the documentaries "Iron Butterflies" by Roman Liubyi and "We will not fade away" by Alisa Kovalenko, which premiered at the Berlinale 2023. A retrospective of Ukrainian Poetic Cinema of the 1960s will also be dedicated to the era and the films that have had a significant impact on the history and identity of Ukrainian cinema/Ukrainian film history. A retrospective will be shown for the first time this year as part of the festival and is presented in cooperation with the Ukrainian Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre and the German DEFA-Stiftung.