Kira's Dream

Kira's Dream is a musical odyssey about inner exile — about trying to escape a state where home no longer feels like home. Kira lives among the ruins of the past and can no longer believe in the future, in the midst of war. She wants to leave Ukraine for Australia in 2022, but this journey turns into an inner pilgrimage. Along the way, Kira faces the question: what is home — a place, a memory, a hope, a sense of belonging, or a source of meaning?
I didn’t make this film because I had the opportunity. I had nothing — except doubts and a deep inner feeling that it was now or never. It was important to me not just to tell a story. It was important to record a testimony — a testimony that even when we are being destroyed, we are still capable of creating.
This is a film about a home where you no longer feel needed. What do you do when your body, your language, your past no longer interest anyone—not society, not the system, not even those you once considered your own?
At first, I wanted to tell the story of two sisters. But gradually I realized I was telling the story of a country — and then, that it was no longer a country, but fragments. The sisters are like two poles of the same body. Kira is the one who is exhausted, who’s on the edge, who wants to disappear. Natalia is still a child, still believes, still knows how to laugh. And both of them are Ukraine. And both of them are me.
Against the backdrop of a post-Soviet landscape that slowly turns into a metaphysical space, the film unfolds as a musical in the style of Ukrainian Baroque. Its aesthetic is not a reconstruction of the past or present, but their transformation into a new form of the future.
The film is structured around a counterpoint between the realistic, almost documentary-like existence of the characters and the musical-choreographic episodes. It is in the songs that the characters express what they are unable to say in real life. The film’s poetics emerge from the collision of Ukrainian sensitivity with the Soviet legacy and the anxieties of the present.
It’s a musical, but not the kind where people dance on rooftops and fall in love. Our musical is when you're singing in a gynecologist’s waiting room because silence is no longer possible, when the second-hand store turns into a dance party, because we have no other theatre. Because imagination is the last thing we still possess.
The film was created during the war, air raids, explosions outside the windows, ideological pressure, and internal emigration. And yet the result is a film that does not accuse — it questions. It's a film about dignity, loneliness, and the human capacity to dance and dream, even in a completely ruined world. Kira's Dream is an example of a film created within a national context that nonetheless reaches toward universal, archetypal meanings of identity.
I don’t know if a film can change anything.
This film is my response to silence, to the silent gazes of people here, in Ukraine. Kira's Dream is for those who are still searching for home. For those who were forced to leave it. For those who still live in it, but no longer know where it is, or what it even means.
And for those who can still say: “Mom, I love you”.
Director Denys Kolesnikov