2013. Exiled in Switzerland, Olga, a talented and passionate 15-year-old Ukrainian gymnast, is trying to secure a place in the National Sports Centre. But the Euromaidan revolt erupts in Kyiv, and suddenly her loved ones are involved. While the girl is adapting to her new country and preparing for the European Championships, the Ukrainian revolution makes its way into her life, and nothing will ever be the same again.
Coffee And Cigarettes is a collection of eleven films from cult director Jim Jarmusch. Each film hosts star studded cast of extremely unique individuals who all share the common activities of conversing while drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.
In 1890, in one of the villages of Ukrainian Polissia, a man died under mysterious circumstances. The locals blamed his wife, a young healer, and banished her from the village. When affliction came to the village, people believed they had been cursed by the castaway woman. They discovered she was living in the forest, found her and burned her alive as a witch. But before doing it, they sent a priest to have a final conversation with her.
Drei Patienten
Mavka, a water nymph, loves Lukash, a country youth. Their brief happiness ends when Lukash is forced to marry the shrewish Kilina. The Spirit of the Forest turns Lukash into a wolf as punishment for his infidelity. The strength of Mavka's love breaks the spell, but Kilina curses the nymph, transforming her into a weeping willow. This beautiful and tragic story is based on a play written in 1912 by Lesya Ukrainka, a Ukrainian poet, writer and political, civil and female activist, and includes mythological characters taken from Ukrainian folklore.
An ordinary funeral procession moves along its path from church to cemetery. Observing, you slip from reality into a place where time has lost its linearity, looping through the odd images thrown off by a distorted reality. Images of non-existence, of varying reflections of death issuing from both past and future, concrete yet abstract, horrible yet desirable. A family asks a young psychiatrist to be their guest for a while to untangle the circumstances of their father's illness. He's developed a suicidal fixation for ropes and knots among other things. While deeply involved in analyzing the patient's delirium, the doctor begins to lose track of what is taking place. The task of "how to help" is twisted into "who am I? Doctor or patient? Chance guest, member of this suffering family, or a catholic priest who has dreamed this all up?" In order to get a handle on it all, it's best to start from the beginning, but why do things keep shifting, changing?
When Mostafa arrives to Ukraine, he witnesses the kidnapping of an Egyptian scientist. Eventually he gets involved in rescuing him, in a country he knows nothing about.
Survivors tell the story of the Babyn Yar massacre from WWII, where some 100,000 people were massacred by German forces.
When perpetually single, aging music industry exec Harry Sanborn, and his latest trophy girlfriend, Marin, arrive at her mother's beach house in the Hamptons, they find that her mother, playwright Erica Barry, also plans to stay for the weekend. Erica is scandalized by the relationship and Harry's sexist ways. But when Harry has a heart attack while there, and the doctor prescribes bedrest, his only option is to stay at the Barry home. Left in the care of Erica and his doctor, a love triangle starts to take shape.
A nurse from Ukraine searches for a better life in the West, while an unemployed security guard from Austria heads East for the same reason. Both are looking for work, a new beginning, an existence, struggling to believe in themselves, to find a meaning in life...
The new reality changes the usual life in the village of Babylon. Attempts to communize the small town are met with resistance from the rich people living in the town. The Red Army finally puts down the resistance. Amidst the resistance philosopher Fabian returns to Babylon and tries to prevent bloodshed, but he meets a tragic fate.
The story of the "Hutsul Robin Hood" Oleksa Dovbush, an 18th century Carpathian Mountains outlaw who's a popular figure of Ukrainian legend.
Under no circumstances will a person become a monster except voluntarily. The example of a boy whose life is seemingly crippled by the external circumstances will prove that kindness and sympathy are much more natural for people then hatred and evil.
Young MMA fighter Yuliya has lost her boyfriend in the war in eastern Ukraine. She starts a new relationship to make her life move forward.
The story of a Ukrainian family living on the border of Russia and Ukraine during the start of the war. Irka refuses to leave her house even as the village gets captured by armed forces. Shortly after they find themselves at the center of an international air crash catastrophe on July 17, 2014.
This film is about what the routine of everyday life can do to the human mind and psyche. It also reflects on the importance of the choices we make and how limited these choices are in the first place. The plot evolves around a family of four. They live in the suburbs, in a strange villa that appears, through a complex game of mirrors, to be more like a piece of installation art than a real house. The main character, who hardly appears on screen, is the son, a man in his thirties. Suffering from asthma and eczema since childhood, he uses his condition to manipulate his parents and his sister. Thus the existence of the terrorized family turns into an endless ritual of attempting to satisfy his whims, and always on the alert for yet another one of his “health crises”. Las Meninas resembles the scattered pieces of a puzzle. It is up to the viewer to assemble them in order to form his very own picture – something that makes the film itself personal and unique.
The heroine lives in Kyiv in the present and sees dreams with the recurring motif that takes place eighty years ago. In these dreams, she searches for her home and waits for her beloved husband. The dreams are permeated with fear and the foreboding of a war that could leave her without a husband and home. The film was conceived as a psychoanalytical visual essay on how a subject who has experienced loss tries to assemble themselves from splinters: fragments of memories, dreams, bodily sensations - to find this new self-image 'on the other side of the mirror' after the Other has disappeared.
Ukrainian refugee Sofiy living in Edinburgh with a host couple Martin and Emilly becomes homeless when the couple who are struggling with the cost of living crisis is forced to 'kick' her out after six months of sheltering her in their study. Homeless and jobless, Sofiy finds a diamond ring in a public washing machine and her decision to do with the diamond ring becomes a life-changing move for her.
Ambulance driver Frank Jessup is ensnared in the schemes of the sensuous but dangerous Diane Tremayne.
Theater and film actor, Mykola Veresen' dies on the set while performing the role of Ivan the Terrible. In the moment of death, his karma transforms into the bloody murderer he embodied, and he falls into Sheol, a common grave for all the dead. The time has a different flow here, the only feelings left are fear and pain. In hell Mykola learns about the confrontation that last for centuries between the white and black vampires, he becomes a puppet in the cruel guerrilla of these two supernatural groups.