Two iconic Melbourne film festivals will be showcasing Ukrainian films during July and August 2023 in Melbourne and online.
The Melbourne Documentary Film Festival, one of the biggest showcases of documentaries in the Southern Hemisphere, will be screening A Rising Fury on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @8:15pm at Purple Palace in Cinema Nova.
The movie follows two hopeful Ukrainian idealists, Pavlo and Svitlana, from the peaceful protest in Kyiv in 2013 to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Filmed over 8 years, Pavlo and Svitlana meet and fall in love during the Maidan Revolution, but find themselves on the battle lines protecting their land, democracy and their relationship after Russia annexes the Crimean Peninsula and invades eastern Ukraine in 2014.
See here for more information about A Rising Fury.
The Melbourne International Film Festival in August 2023, one of the world’s oldest film festivals alongside Cannes and Berlin, will feature two films on Ukrainian themes:
Iron Butterflies | MIFF 2023, on 9 and 19 August – a surreal and haunting documentary, in which a Ukrainian filmmaker obsessively sifts through the shrapnel of the MH17 plane crash, cataloguing the swathe of propaganda spread by Russian authorities who denied their involvement, auguring their justifications for launching their full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022
Ukraine Guernica – Artist War | MIFF 2023 in cinema on 12 and 14 August, streaming options 18-27 Aug – activist and filmmaker George Gittoes follows the frontline artists daring to stand up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.