Once Upon a Time in Ukraine

a dream i'd carried since i was twelve

this trip had a long runway. we travelled a lot as a family when i was a kid, and somewhere on those roads i fell for two things at once — going places, and the movies. around twelve i found the imdb top 250 and turned it into a ritual: a film or two a day, and a notebook where i wrote down what each one taught me. that's where the wish to make cinema actually began.

later i started filming for real — first just my own life, the small moments, then putting my own money into proper films. it cost me. the day after i wrapped my first one, i couldn't cover rent and had to move out; i spent a whole day in a shopping mall with a suitcase, no idea where to go, until friends took me in. around then i started painting, another way to get the creativity out.

one dream kept coming back: get a van, build it into a home on wheels, and just go. for half a year i planned it — saved, borrowed, built the caravan myself out of an old repair bus. then, three days before we were meant to leave, the whole team i'd planned to travel with backed out. everything was ready and there was no one to go with — until, at the last moment, my father offered to drive.

so we went, the two of us. the idea at the film's centre was simple: buy ten large canvases and ten smaller ones and paint wherever we ended up — wherever, as we put it, god carried us. i'm no painter, but at each stop i tried to leave a little piece of myself on the canvas and let the place do the rest. i'd just started seeing my girlfriend then; her parents let her come, and she joined us on day 11 — so by the end it was the three of us. 15 days, ~3,500km, around 10 locations. it's still one of my favourite stretches of my whole life.

we didn't know it at the time, but it was the last summer before the war — some of the places we filmed are now occupied territory, and a road-trip film became, without meaning to, an archive. it wasn't a phone-out-the-window diary either: we wrote a full script, had it voiced by the narrator who officially voices Netflix in Ukraine, and scored it with original music. 10+ hours of footage came out of those 15 days — the edit is where it lives right now.

the video, so far

a piece from the trip is already up — the rest is still in the cut.