UFF 2025: Love Letters from Ukraine (Short Films)

Love transcends gender, distance, and age—it arrives unexpectedly, often in the most unusual and bizarre ways. Every sensation is heightened, every emotion intensified, especially when love finds you in the midst of war. These five stories from Ukraine invite you to experience the thrill and the sorrow that love can bring—intimacy, appreciation, and the grief of loss.

– Teatralna station, dir. Alina Panasenko, 2022, 16`

Tymofii is a young pickpocket, living an ordinary life until he unexpectedly falls for a station officer at Teatralna metro station in Kyiv.

– Deep Love, dir Mykyta Lyskov, 2019, 14`

This film is made up of episodes that aren’t connected by a traditional storyline or style but share a consistent mood and meaning. It’s shot entirely without dialogue, unfolding as a clever, contemplative meditation on human relationships, expressed purely through sound.

– Deep Water, dir. Anna Dudko, 2021, 6`

A lonely, chubby mermaid secretly watches the human world through water pipes. One day, she falls in love with a man and, blinded by passion, enters his apartment to satisfy her burning desires.

– In Joy, Marina Roschina, 2018, 28`

Kate is a young single mother who falls in love with a man but lacks the courage to tell him she has a son. As their relationship quickly deepens, the truth becomes harder to share. She soon faces a difficult choice between her own happiness and her responsibilities as a mother.

– Storks Always Come Home, dir. Halyna Koziutynska, 2023, 27`

Gala and Viktor are searching for their own Heaven. Even amid the war. They buy an abandoned house in the Carpathian Mountains and start repairing it. It’s a place of peace and calmness, where they can grow their own food, be silent, be defenceless, and drink coffee while looking at the mountains and a stork’s nest. But winter comes. The apple tree in the yard freezes, and the war reaches Heaven.

Followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers.