Shorts from Ukrainian Female Film | Ukrainian film festival 2026

Genre: Short films  Years: 2021 to 2025  Duration: 94 min

Language: Ukrainian and Russian with English subtitles

This program brings together six short films by Ukrainian female directors that centre female experience within the shifting realities of present-day Ukraine. Working across fiction and animation, the filmmakers approach questions of identity, intimacy, displacement, and self-determination with precision and emotional clarity.

Taken together, these films do not present a single narrative of womanhood. Instead, they offer a range of perspectives shaped by different ages, contexts, and artistic approaches. What unites them is a commitment to placing women’s voices at the centre — attentive to everyday experience while remaining conscious of the broader political and social conditions in which these lives unfold.

Curated by Sasha Prokopenko and Olga Gusiatynska, in partnership with Kyiv International Short Film Festival.

Kittens (Zhanna Ozirna, 2023)  9 min

Two girls in a Lviv apartment begin a normal conversation about their future together. Amidst the remnants of traditional Ukrainian life, ordinary dreams of tomorrow come up against fossilised social norms and orders. Some people have to fight society for things that most people take for granted. Surrounded by everyday scenery and dealing with the usual household tasks, their sincere conversation turns into a global question.

The Diaper Cake (Anastasia Babenko, 2021) 18 min

Lena and Vitya, both in their early twenties, are two kids who now have a kid of their own. In the postnatal hospital room, as if suspended in limbo, their first team project is to wake their son for a feeding. As the new parents are trying to do their best, they have to deal with the irreversible changes in their lives and with each other. Meanwhile, the diaper cake silently sits in the room, like a time bomb.

Kira (Anastasiia Obodovska, 2023) 27 min

When the full-scale invasion begins, Kira can’t get away from her internal fever — she has to go to the frontline. She is 28 and she is a veterinarian, so it is natural for her to become a paramedic. But there is one ‘but’ — her twelve-year-old son, Vitia, whom Kira is raising alone. So the first question is: with whom to leave the child? The second question is whether Kira can really leave her son. She has been a mother most of her life. She has always protected her son herself, always been there for him. Maybe it’s time to protect something else?

The Seventh Shift (Natalia Ilchuk, 2023) 15 min

‘The Seventh Shift’ is a portrait of a solitary woman who works four jobs in a nearly abandoned Ukrainian town. She manages to maintain her integrity by avoiding the paradigms imposed by the social conditions of existence, focusing instead on the world beyond the material dimension with its many limitations. Continual ritual gestures that do not involve obtaining a profit, and an irrational faith in an unattainable future, have become the main basis of this film where prosaic reality is not expressed explicitly but through the visual poetry of an industrial town in decay.

I Died in Irpin (Anastasiia Falilieieva, 2024) 11 min

On the 24th of February in the morning, my boyfriend and I decided to go from Kyiv to Irpin to see his parents. It is hard for me to recall the chronology of those days, my mind blocks and minimises all the memories, erases them, but the only thing I know for sure is that every day everything rapidly became worse.

Prelude (Alina Panasenko, 2025) 14 min

While cruising through the nocturnal streets of war-shadowed Kyiv, Anna — a civilian woman with a camera — films passing men with quiet intensity. Her lens lingers on their faces, bodies, and movements, capturing fragments of masculinity. One night, she unexpectedly encounters a soldier — not just another subject, but someone who interrupts the frame. Their conversation begins awkwardly, circling around the men she’s observed, but unfolds into a strange but deep connection.

Followed by an online Q&A session with the filmmakers.