Dana Kavelina

In this digitally rendered speculative future, the dead from the war on Ukraine are given the choice to live again – to reckon with past trauma. Painful memories can be removed and archived to a living monument, revisited with an emotional distance; full memory immersion for perpetrators ensures they never forget.

The film tackles a difficult and complex subject: the Lviv Pogroms of June and July 1941 and the subsequent unfolding of the Shoah in the city.

Experimental short film with animation and appropriation of amateur footage shot during the war in the Donbass region of Ukraine, recombined into a surreal anti-war film-poem.

One video channel shows people talking about a certain monument that was presumably erected to memorize the Catastrophe, but their speech falls apart, and we cannot compose a single image of either the monument or the catastrophe that happened to these people. Their speech is too desintegrated, their evidences get confused, their memory slips away, and the catastrophe remains dissolved in the air, like the city that appears on the screen in the form of fragments washed away by rain. On the other video channel, a person interacts with monuments, exploring the possibilities of juxtaposing her body and the stone bodies of historical catastrophes.

Mark L. Tulip was born and raised in Luhansk. He is certain that he will be buried there as well. He has children and a granddaughter, a garden, a cat called Donbas and a dog Malva. However, the political events in Ukraine in 2014 change his habitual way of living: his own family splits into smithereens. Mark L. Tulip intends to live the life on his native land but when the war comes to Luhansk, he has to escape abandoning his garden, the dog and the cat forever. Still, the hardships of new life don't come to the end.

With Russia's war of aggression and invasion of the sovereign neighboring state Ukraine since 24.02.2022, the power of the art is not extinguished. 'l'énigme du jour' (Riddle of the Day) is created in March 2022 in Kyiv during the encirclement, siege and bombardment of the city by the Russian troops. It is a dialogue between the Ukrainian artists Dana Kavelina and Nikita Kadan.

At the heart of the film is a Yiddish song about hunger that was written and sung during World War I in Poland. The song uses the metaphor of the wind as a force of destruction—blowing away rooftops, birds, crops, and trees, leaving behind a landscape of desolation. Reappearing during the Holocaust, it gained new significance as an expression of suffering and loss, an echo of a catastrophe unfolding again. In Just Landscape, the song operates as both an auditory and emotional anchor, resonating with themes of displacement, war, and survival.