Screenings
August 25 20:00
DEBATOUN GUESTHOUSE
Ptitsa
Poland, 2022, 30’
in Russian w/Arm./Eng.subtitles
Director and Scriptwriter: Alina Maksimenko
Producers: Filip Marczewski, Katarzyna Madaj-Kozłowska
Cinematographer: Alina Maksimenko
Composer: Vladimir Tarasov
Editor: Feliks Mamczur
Sound: Alina Maksimenko
Production Company: Wajda Studio
Set during a pandemic, the story unfolds in the family home of two women – a mother and her adult daughter. In one part of the house is the mother’s music school, which she runs online. She is a piano teacher, a strong and organized woman who only has contact with her students and therefore has an endless sea of children around her. The other part of the building houses the daughter’s painting studio. The two worlds rarely come into contact with one another, constituting a metaphor for human loneliness. Ultimately, however, the protagonists are brought together by the story of the death of Katya, the daughter of their friend Inna.
Awards
Main Award, It’s All True! IDFF, Brazil, 2023; Best Direction, Astra Film Festival, Romania, 2023; Andrei Matrasov Award, Docudays UA, Ukraine, 2023.
Alina Maksimenko
Alina Maksimenko is an artist born in Kiev, Ukraine. Painter, film director, and director of photography. During the years 1985-1988, she studied in an Art School named after T.G. Shevchenko. She graduated from Kiev Art. College of M. Boychuk in 1993. In 2014, she showed her first video installation at the Kiev Arsenal. She also finished a documentary film directing specialty in the class of Sergey Bukovsky, Radio Broadcasting and Press Institute in 2019. She graduated from the DOK PRO educational program at Wajda School in 2020. She has been a member of the BG-Art Union of Artists since 2001 and a member of the Art Union of Painters of Ukraine since 2003. She lived and worked in Ukraine until the war broke and she had to flee the country. Her feature-length documentary debut “In Limbo” premiered at Visions du Reel and Millennium Docs Against Gravity.
Filmography
Ptitsa (2022), In Limbo (2024).