A Ukrainian platoon crosses a heavily fortified forest on a mission to liberate a strategic village from Russian forces.
This year, FIDOCS dedicates a showcase to contemporary Ukrainian cinema. In partnership with Docudays UA, a leading festival that, amidst the war, brings together a community of filmmakers, activists, and viewers in person in Kyiv to explore cinema's potential to represent violence, injustice, and pain, but also the forms and gestures of survival. We present three recently produced films that will be screened for the first time in Chile, and which confront the experience of a country in a state of emergency. These are works that interrogate archives, testimonies, and the staging of reality to consider what remains of humanity when it often seems that little of it remains. As the writer and physician Mikhail Bulgakov reminds us:“The tongue can hide the truth, but the eyes, never!”".
Danilo Petrovich, FIDOCS 29 programmer
Mstyslav Chernov is a Ukrainian filmmaker, war correspondent, videographer, photojournalist, and novelist. He is renowned for his coverage of the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine, the Donbas War, the tragedy of flight MH1, and the Syrian Civil War, among other conflicts. His film '20 Days in Mariupol' (2023) won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for his work with the Associated Press.