PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Ukrainian American - breathing the past into the present (Ukrainian American) is a first-person, semi-experimental, feature-length documentary film project that explores the emotional complexity of proximity to war without being in its direct path.
It asks: What does it mean to be shaped by a conflict that you are not living through directly, yet which lives inside you?
Anchored in my experience as a Ukrainian-American filmmaker based in Buffalo, NY, this project traces recurring cycles of memory, grief, cultural reclamation, and creative resistance drawn from my personal experience and those of my diasporic peers. Spanning eleven years of journals, video essays, social media posts, screen grabs and informal interviews, the film narrative will flow like memory itself: nonlinear, layered, rhythmic; shifting through; creating new understandings and growth.