Polina Kelm
Directing
Biography
Polina Kelm is a Ukrainian film director and documentary filmmaker. In 2010, she graduated from the Karpenko-Karyi National University of Theatre, Cinema and Television with a degree in film directing. She works as a screenwriter, director, and producer. The film One Step Away From the Holiday from the documentary almanac PozaEuro was selected for screening at the Kraków Film Festival in 2013. The documentary film Positive was shown at festivals such as Docudays, Jihlava IDFF, DOK Leipzig, and HotDocs. In 2014, the film was nominated for Best Documentary by the National Guild of Cinematographers of Ukraine and Best Short Documentary, Silver Eye Award, Jihlava IDFF. She is a member of the Ukrainian Guild of Directors and the Documentary Association of Europe (DAE). In 2021, she organized a laboratory to support Ukrainian documentary filmmakers with their projects in the development stage - UkrDocLab/UkrDocLab. The first session was held with the participation of international tutor Mikael Opstrup and with the support of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation.
Known For
Lena, Taya and Tamara live in Kyiv and work at local cinema studios. They got used to editing other people’s movies by working with positive film strips only, and they are afraid of computers. Their world is a world of lost and dusty tapes on the floors. They breed cats, watch the Oscar ceremonies every year and secretly dream of working on movies like Avatar. All their lives they have remained on the backstage of the cinema world, on the other side of the screen. And now it’s their time to come onto the stage…
Positive
The characters in the film live in the real world, but their imagination, which recreates their fears and doubts, exists alongside it, sometimes crossing the line.
Continuity
A short drama.
The House
Fro is a woman from a small Ukrainian town. Her life has become dull and sluggish since her husband left to seek new horizons and employment opportunities in Europe. All she can do is wait. An adaptation of Andrei Platonov's short story "Fro."
Fro
The shadows is about homelessness, but not about hopelessness. The difference between them it’s just one letter. But at the same time it’s an abyss. This story began three years ago as an observation of the photographer Sasha Chekmenyov during his work with the homeless. It was supposed to be a film about another world that we wish to ignore.
The Shadows
"Beyond Euro" is the result of collective work of the youth creative laboratory. His idea can probably be defined as an attempt to impersonate the crowd. The ability to see, to distinguish a human face from a crowd that seems faceless, cohesive on a sporting, political, or any other basis. And tell me about it. That's probably the point. Both the Almanac and the laboratory. How successful this experiment is will be judged by the audience. In any case, it took place. And here is a series of attentive, thoughtful, concerned or ironic, but always caring and independent views of young authors on the reality that surrounds them. To see a separate human face in a crowd also means to keep your own. In any crowd... which is thus personified and gets a chance to turn into a society. The thought is not new, but it needs to be reminded.