Vasyl Kukharskyi

Marat, a 40-year-old man, has been considered dead for over 3 years. He returns to his home town to restore his documents. However, his return turns out impossible.

Ukraine - 1636. Someone has attacked a battalion of cossacks that were transporting the gold of the Polish king. A cossack - Maksym Osa - tries to find the missing gold, but soon becomes one of the main suspects.

Nina, 30, a Ukrainian language teacher who can't leave the city of Luhansk, occupied by separatists in Eastern Ukraine, is forced to undergo retraining courses for teaching Russian. Andrii, 17, is a student who was orphaned in the aftermath of the war. They cross paths when Nina witnesses Andrii being arrested by the police after hanging the Ukrainian flag from the roof of his school. Nina knows that because they live in a world of injustice and lies Andrii can stay in jail for a long time, and she risks her life to free him. As they gravitate towards each other, they try to remind people in the occupied territories that they deserve a future, too.

There is a ballad written by Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko called “That Catherine's hut is on the hill...". It is about a rescue of Catherine's lover, whom she saves by posing him as her brother. This story, as a parable, flies throughout Ukraine's history and reconstructs its dramatic and heroic episodes. Every challenge, including the Chernobyl accident, leaves Catherine without her home. But she is stubborn, as many generations of Ukrainians, in rebuilding her house out of pieces. The story is not only about Catherine's redemption, but also about Ukraine's survival throughout the centuries that is reflected in a folk tradition called Toloka.

The film is based on the biographical events of the Crimeans' leader, human rights activist, Soviet political prisoner and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Mustafa Jemilev. Summer of 1980. Mustafa Jemilev spends a four-year exile in Yakut village Zyryanka, where he works at an oxygen station. Every day he fills rusty tanks with oxygen and rolls them to the dock. This monotonous and exhausting work makes him resembled to the mythological Sisyphus. The events happen after 300-days hunger strike, which made him known all around the globe.

In the wild steppes of southern Ukraine, a young nature researcher named Yura is looking for an endangered species of groundhog but instead witnesses a crime. Eager to expose the truth, Yura takes his photo evidence to the local newspaper's editorial office. However, he quickly realizes that nobody there cares about pursuing justice. While a big war is looming over the horizon, Yura's naive worldview is splintering in a storm of fake news, rigged political elections, and mysterious cult rituals. On his quest, the hero is about to find out who he really is-an endangered species of a good man or just a loser?

You can walk away from a war, but it will forever leave an imprint on your life. The main characters return to their previously familiar lives - work, family and children. But they are broken - the war has broken them.