LUKIA COSTELLO - docs from the heart

Ostarbeiter (2019) 2:00

Combining family photos, original photographic work, social media screenshots, and Ukrainian cultural artifacts, this work has been created in conjunction with a documentary film project by the same name. 'Ostarbeiter' examines the effects of transgenerational trauma and Nazi Germany's slave laborer program that impacted the lives of between 3-5 million Central and Eastern Europeans during World War II.

Directors Statement

My grandmother was deeply marked by war — by loss, displacement, and the suffocating weight of occupation. Whether her pain came from trauma, grief, or something that fractured within her, I may never fully know. What I do know is that she did not choose this. No one does.

Ostarbeiter emerged from that knowing — a quiet attempt to make sense of inherited wounds that words alone cannot hold. Through family photographs, personal archives, and fragments of Ukrainian cultural memory, I sought to illuminate the invisible legacy

of emotional abuse: the way it echoes through generations, and how love can still exist within it.

This film is not an accusation but an act of empathy — an acknowledgment that those who harm are often shaped by harm themselves. It is a reckoning with the horror of what we inherit, and a gesture of forgiveness toward those who could not heal in their own time

CREDITS

DIRECTED, WRITTEN & PRODUCED BY

Lukia Costello & Tilke Hill

ART DIRECTION, EDITING , SOUND DESIGN & VFX

Lukia Costello

CINEMATOGRAPHY & FIELD RECORDING

Lukia Costello