Two Ukrainian films nominated for European Film Academy Award

The nominees for this year's European Film Academy Awards 2023 have been announced. Among them are two Ukrainian films, the European Film Academy reports on its official website.

The post-Soviet noir detective movie La Palisiada, directed by Filip Sotnychenko, is nominated for an award in the Discovery of the Year - FIPRESCI Prize category. It will compete for the victory with five more films.

The first Ukrainian film to be nominated in this category of the European Film Awards was Plemʼia (Tribe) by Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi. Last year, the nominees in this category included the drama Pamfir by Dmytro Sukholytkyi-Sobchuk and the co-production tape Tsensorka, directed by Peter Kerekes.

 

Shot from La Palisiada

La Palisiada is Sotnychenko’s full-length debut. The film tells a story about two friends, a police detective and a forensic psychiatrist, who investigate the murder of their colleague. Events unfold in Ukraine in 1996, a few months before the signing of Protocol No. 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which provided for the rejection of the death penalty.

The world premiere of the film took place at the Rotterdam Film Festival. There, the film was presented in the main competition and received the FIPRESCI award.

Another film that was among the nominees of the European Film Awards 2023 is Motherland directed by Hanna Badziaka and Alexander Mihalkovich. This film is co-produced by Sweden, Ukraine and Norway. It was nominated for Best Documentary.

The work of Badziaka and Mihalkovich tells the audience about the 2020 protests in Belarus and explores the culture of violence and bullying in the Belarusian army, which creates a traumatised generation. The main character of the tape is a woman named Svetlana, whose son Nikita was found hanged in a military unit two years ago.

 

Shot from Motherland

The Motherland was included in the programme of this year's Odesa Film Festival, which was held in Chernivtsi.

Director Alexander Mikhalkovich made his debut in a full-length documentary in 2019 with the film about the annexed Crimea, dubbed My Granny from Mars.

The European Film Awards is an annual award given to the best European films. This year, the presentation will take place in Berlin on December 9.

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