Authors — Sonya Vseliubska
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From Fables to Forensics: Five Documentaries from CPH:DOX 2026
CPH:DOX’s 2025 edition opened with Facing War, a documentary presenting the Russo-Ukrainian war through the final year of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s tenure. Though some critics found the film overly cautious in its presentation of political lobbying, its premiere proved unexpectedly well-timed amid Trump’s return to power and anxieties surrounding European alliances. For CPH:DOX today, as one of the world’s leading documentary festivals, the familiar impulse to pair aesthetic ambition with political mediation feels ever more crucial as wars expand and multiply. Continuing the festival’s Ukraine-focused opening-film tradition, Pieter-Jan De Pue’s Mariinka is exactly the kind of work that […]
by Sonya Vseliubska on Mar 23, 2026 -
Scandalous Forms, Political Candor: Highlights from Berlinale’s 2026 Forum Documentaries
Before the Berlinale announced its official selection, it presented a remarkable retrospective entitled Lost in the 90s. Spanning wide geographies, with particular emphasis on narratives surrounding the Soviet collapse and the fall of the Berlin Wall, it brought together an eclectic cohort of documentaries and fiction—from Farocki and Godard to an underscreened Belarusian doc Orange Vests and the first fiction feature on the Chornobyl catastrophe Collapse. Such a politically charged program of films by formally daring directors with an activist spirit could serve as an inspiring point of departure for the festival to adopt an openly political rhetoric. More precisely, […]
by Sonya Vseliubska on Feb 24, 2026 -
“The Question of Whether Ukraine Will Exist at All”: Valentyn Vasyanovych on TIFF 2025 Premiere To the Victory!
When Valentyn Vasyanovych shot The Tribe (2014) by Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi, he was a cinematographer and emerging director. Shortly after, he developed an impressive oeuvre of his own beginning with Black Level (2017), a dialogue-free film about a wedding photographer in a midlife crisis. Similarly to The Tribe, Vasyanovych was exploring a novel cinematic language within a new wartime reality, establishing a formal strategy consisting of a strictly static camera and deep focus, extended mise-en-scène and minimal editing through which his films can be recognized. Two subsequent fiction features brought him international acclaim, whose frighteningly prescient narratives helped him attain the […]
by Sonya Vseliubska on Sep 4, 2025 -
“I Had Never Filmed Near the Front Before”: Dmytro Hreshko on Karlovy Vary-Premiering Ukrainian War Documentary Divia
At a time when observation remains the dominant approach among contemporary Ukrainian documentarians and it feels as though every subject suited to a distanced gaze has already been explored, in Divia Dmytro Hreshko approaches nature during wartime with radical, dialogue-free minimalism. Originally from Uzhhorod, a city on the Slovakian border, Hreshko has celebrated Ukraine’s landscape in previous documentaries such as Snow Leopards of the Carpathians (2019) or Mountains and Heaven in Between (2022). With his signature admiration for picturesque scenery—captured through drone and sustained by extra-long shots with deep focus—Divia is a harmonious continuation of his career as both director […]
by Sonya Vseliubska on Jul 7, 2025
