Traces
Traces shines a light on Ukrainian women who, after surviving conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) and torture during Russia’s war, refuse to remain silent.
Simple Structures: Films of Docudays UA-2026
Message in the Bottle
Authors: Kateryna Ruzhyna
Ukraine202517'09'’
In original language, available with English and Ukrainian subtitles.
In original language, available with English and Ukrainian subtitles.
Message in the Bottle is a documentary-experimental video about the personal and collective connection to Ukraine’s lost waters: the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov, and the Kakhovka Reservoir.
Since 2014, Ukraine has been going through a gradual process of being cut off from these waters, which have shaped its landscape, memory, and identity. Here, water is not only geography, but also a source of life, renewal, and protection. Its loss represents not only an environmental trauma, but also a cultural and existential one.
The film works with collective memory through oral histories, archives, and personal recollections. Its protagonists reconstruct intimate images of disappearing places, presenting memory as a process of rethinking and reclaiming the past.
Camera:
Darja Lukjanenko, Polina Olkhovnikova, Kateryna Ruzhyna
Read more about the film on DOCUDAYS UA
More films in the programme of Simple Structures: Films of Docudays UA-2026
The Illusion of a Quiet Night
On the night of July 27–28, 2025, forty cinematographers and hundreds of people captured a single summer night in Ukraine.
Silent Flood
A closed religious community in Ukraine has chosen to live in a beautiful landscape, where the front lines of both World War I and World War II once passed.
Don't Ask Me If I Killed
A meditation on endurance and moral gravity — on what remains of a person when the world forces them to fight.
Where Everything Disappears
Dmytro Dokunov, a Ukrainian nature-loving DOP and digital artist is enrolled in a combat unit to face the Russian invasion.
The Blessed Ones
Suddenly thrown into a brutal war, a group of Ukrainian artists must face a once unimaginable question: What can artists do when the world is burning?
The Silence of Others
A cinematic portrait of the first attempt in history to prosecute crimes of Franco’s 40-year dictatorship in Spain.
Written Down As Father
The spoken and unspoken correspondence between an abandoned daughter and a father defending his homeland.
Apocalypse Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, and the Day After Tomorrow
Why do some people choose to stay in their homeland even when each day might be their last?
Ember
In 2022, as Russian forces reached the outskirts of Kyiv, an elderly couple lost their home and everything in it.
Balance
What endures and what is missing, even when one has found refuge?
Homecoming
A boy returns home via a robotic dog, his mechanical avatar, which he controls from his room in Poland.
One Day I Wish to See You Happy
Against the backdrop of war in Ukraine, filmmakers Max and Maryna try to hold on to their relationship as everyday life slowly falls apart around them.
Peace for Nina
A documentary about a mother whose life has been shattered by war.
Scales
A short autofiction film blending personal video archives, performed scenes, and experimental sound into a road trip.
Broken Glass
Director searches for a gentler way back to artistic practice within the routines of meal preparation - one that embraces imperfection, vulnerability and transience.
Pietà
A short documentary confession about a mother who has lost her son in war.
And Where Now?
A multi-part video work created from materials filmed by the artist along Ukraine’s eastern frontlines while working as a fixer.
I Am a Rock
Playing with Magritte’s “The Treachery of Images” and a song by Simon & Garfunkel, the work delves into the paradoxical relationship between nature, language, and representation.