Oksana Karpovych
Directing
Biography
Oksana Karpovych (born 1990) is a Ukrainian documentary film director, most noted for her 2024 film Intercepted. Originally from Kyiv, she moved to Canada in the 2010s to study documentary filmmaking at the Mel H. Hoppenheim School of Cinema. Her first documentary film, Don't Worry, the Doors Will Open (Ne khvylyuysya, dveri vidchynyatsya), premiered at the 2019 Montreal International Documentary Festival, where it won the New Vision Award. It was a nominee for the Directors Guild of Canada's DGC Discovery Award in 2020. Intercepted premiered at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival, and was subsequently screened at the 2024 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. It won the Grand Prize for National Feature at the 2024 Montreal International Documentary Festival.
Known For
A journey through Ukraine that reveals the banality of evil behind the Russian invasion with the shocking juxtaposition of two realities: the Ukrainians who have been suffering and resisting the war violence, and the Russian military, and civilians, who have been perpetrating it.
Intercepted
Everything in Sergiy’s immigrant life is temporary except his incurable love for his motherland. He has a Canadian passport but his soul belongs to Ukraine. Despite having lived in Quebec for 15 years he still wants to go back.
Temporary
Woven around the real-life murder of the filmmaker’s great-grandmother, the film brings together polyphony of female voices to describe the experience of womanhood and violence against the backdrop of Ukraine’s tumultuous history and everyday life of the country’s province.
Storms are Whispering
After André Levesque missionnaire, Oksana Karpovych is back at the RIDM with her first feature, which she filmed in her native country, Ukraine. To take the pulse of the country, the filmmaker adopts one of documentary cinema’s most prolific sub-genres: the train film. Filmed entirely in the old, run-down, overcrowded passenger trains used by ordinary Ukrainians, the film captures conversations, observes the landscape, and accompanies several protagonists on their journey; they open our eyes to popular preoccupations in a country that seems perpetually anchored in its highly visible Soviet legacy. A fine lesson in listening and humanity.
Don't Worry, the Doors Will Open
For the past 4 years a devout Catholic Andre Levesque has been performing dance shows inside the trains of Montreal's underground metro. Using old school pop and rock music hits as the accompaniment to his amateur dances, he devotes his performances to Jesus Christ and Virgin Mary.
Andre Levesque Missionary
Immigration resembles a postponed Lacan "mirror stage": a traumatic moment of distancing from your ideal "self", from an imaginary mother's uterus. It is an insight of a negative kind that brings me knowledge that I will never lose. This film is a farewell to my old home, a mosaic of my childhood memories and a weeping psalm to the identity which I left behind.
Lost
An attempt by the director to delve into the nature of sexuality and relationships with her friend in order to understand what their experience together was for them.