Unspooling from 27 August-4 September – and held exceptionally in Kyiv for the third time owing to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – the Odesa International Film Festival (OIFF) is now in its 17th edition and proudly continues on in spite of its change in location. Films from both the national and international competitions are eligible for the Audience Award, known as the Grand Prix, while the FIPRESCI jury will bestow its prize upon one film in the national competition.

Fourteen movies – diverse in regional geography, content and style – will compete for the top prize of the Golden Duke in the International Competition, and ten out of the 14 are European titles. These include the Bulgarian-set Black Money for White Nights by Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov, a tragicomedy that competed at Karlovy Vary earlier this summer, and Gábor Holtai’s psychological thriller Feels Like Home, which took home the Audience Award at Transilvania as well as a Méliès d’Argent at Sitges. Several titles look back on the past, including the Berlinale Special-premiered Heysel 85 by Teodora Ana Mihai – about the Heysel Stadium disaster that took place in Brussels in the titular year – and Finnish filmmaker Alli Haapasalo’s period drama Tell Everyone, about a woman’s struggle for freedom after she is wrongly sent to an asylum on an island.

The international competition will also feature two titles premiered at this year’s IFFR: 3 Days in September by Romania’s Tudor Giurgiu and Tell Me What You Feel by Poland’s Łukasz Ronduda. Rounding off the selection are Ivana Mladenović’s Locarno-screened dark comedy Sorella di Clausura, Slovenian filmmaker Olmo Omerzu’s San Sebastián-premiered Ungrateful Beings, Maciej Sobieszczański’s Warsaw title Brother and Laurent Slama’s Paris Olympics-set A Second Life, selected for Tribeca and Karlovy Vary.

The national competition consists of both fiction and documentary features, each eligible for a Golden Duke in their own categories: Best Ukrainian Feature Fiction Film and Best Ukrainian Feature Documentary Film. Four fiction flicks have been selected: Valentyn Vasyanovych’s Toronto Platform Award winner To the Victory!, Ana Rocha de Sousa’s Wings, Denys Kolesnikov’s Kira’s Dream and Serhii Storozhev’s The Soloist. In the documentary category, ten works will compete, including Volodymyr Tykhyi and Roman Liubyi’s Time Machine Maidan, Yuliia Hontaruk’s To Die to Live, and Roman Ostrovskyi’s Clouds Move with Great Speed.

The festival’s Gala Premieres programme includes both fiction and documentary titles, all 100% Ukrainian or Ukrainian co-productions, which are being brought first to OIFF audiences. These range from fiction films centred on families and adventure dramedies to documentaries about war, memory and national history. OIFF will also host two focus programmes on Georgia and Israel.

Finally, the festival dedicates a retrospective to the works of prolific Ukrainian documentarian Serhii Bukovskyi, who was presented with the Award for Outstanding Contribution to Ukrainian Cinema at the Golden Dzyga Awards (Ukraine’s national film awards) in July (see the news). The retrospective starts with his directorial debut, Tomorrow Is a Holiday (1987), and extends chronologically all the way through to his 2022 film Ivan and Marta.