And They Will Talk About Us

When I was shooting „Postcards From Ukraine“, I realized that I was at a pivotal moment in world history. The country was leaving the Russian sphere of influence and, like an asteroid, was beginning to orbit around our axis in terms of values, history and economy. After the success of the „Maidan uprising“ in 2014, the country’s path towards Westernization accelerated very quickly. However, when I lived there, I could not help but notice that there was still a sense of togetherness that held people together. You could sense that the population still shared common values and the same sentiment. This was, at least in part, the cultural legacy of communism. At the same time, however, new liberal values and a new nationalist ideology were taking hold.
When I met Sergey and Anna in 2014, I was fascinated by their nature; it was as if they carried this change within them.
Sergey belonged to a new class of entrepreneurs coming onto the scene in Kyiv. Anna was an artist and activist, determined to live her life regardless of the old conventions of Slavic women.
However, they were so different that they almost "mirrored" each other.

I grew up in Italy and lived in Germany and Holland. Although I do not speak the language, I am also very familiar with Greece.
What has always struck me about the European continent (and what the comparison with Ukraine has helped me to understand) is that our society is made up of cultural bubbles that are constantly competing with each other without a common set of values to support them.

I made my film by trying to bring into a dialogue two new major trends in Ukrainian society, namely the new class of entrepreneurs and the large number of volunteers who, in the period between the revolution (2014) and Russian aggression (2022), brought enormous support to the people in need in the Donbas. If they had one thing in common, it was their determination to live by refusing to compromise.
I forced myself to stick to their stories and be open to whatever I could not foresee. In other words: I let myself be driven by events because I saw that behind them was the struggle of a country in search of its identity.

When we finished the cut before the lockdown measures and after the Russian attack on Ukrainian soil, the scenario changed completely. Postproduction had to stop and some of them had to go off to war. But I refused to include new scenes and left the substance of the film unchanged, excluding the dramatic events of recent years from the stories.