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With our eyes set on Ukraine

24th THESSALONIKI DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL // 10-20/3/2022

 

With our eyes set on Ukraine

 

Thessaloniki International Film Festival is shocked to watch the latest developments in Ukraine and wishes to express its solidarity to the people so brutally by war. With a profound faith in the power of peace, human values, culture and international law, we make a plea for the immediate cease of the war conflict..

 

In a few days, three documentaries that will be screened within the framework of the 24th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival remind us that people now experiencing the war’s nightmare have been living in the trenches for years now.

 

  • The directorial debut of the French war correspondent Loup Bureau, Trenches, is taking us to the tortured city of Donbas, depicting the naked truth and the cruelty of the struggle for survival. While diplomats are negotiating a precarious truce and ceasefire, men and women spend the best years of their life in the first line of fire, condemned to incessantly dig trenches, while bombs are being dropped right beside them one after the other.

  • As the war in Eastern Ukraine is shattering the destitute families living in close range to the first line, a small group of social workers, featured in the documentary A House Made of Splinters by Danish director Simon Lereng Wilmont, are demonstrating tremendous resilience, working all day long to keep children safe amidst a scenery of horror and desperation. The director had been awarded with TDF’s 2018 Golden Alexander, with his film The Distant Barking of Dogs, which also sheds light onto the most innocent victims of the Eastern Ukraine conflict, the children. A House Made of Splinters will celebrate its international premiere in Thessaloniki.

  • In Putin’s Russia, small-scale channel Dozhd TV raises a voice of protest and independence amidst a suffocating journalistic context. F@ck This Job by Vera Krichevskaya follows the 13-year hard journey of the TV channel’s owner, Natasha, who embraces the LGTBQI community and hires journalists of the opposition. Dozhd TV is transformed into a lone haven of political and sexual freedom, while Natasha becomes the spearhead of the struggle for truth.

 

The Festival stands by the European Film Academy and its intention to offer substantial support to filmmakers in Ukraine, while expressing its most unreserved solidarity to the Ukrainian art community and DocuDays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival’s colleagues who were forced to postpone their 19th edition until after the war has ended and military law has been waived.