The seventh edition of the Ukrainian Film Festival Berlin (UFFB) will take place from 14 to 18 October 2026, bringing contemporary Ukrainian cinema to 11 venues across the German capital. Under the theme “Emergency Spaces”, this year's programme explores how people create places of refuge, solidarity and resistance amid war, displacement and social upheaval. Alongside the main selection of nine films, the festival will feature two short-film competitions, historical retrospectives and discussions examining Ukrainian identity and cultural heritage.

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“The films in the main programme operate precisely on this frontier: a power station fights to survive under fire, a community is trapped between floodwaters and the front line, and a home becomes a place of impossible choices,” explains Valentyna Zalevska, one of the festival's three curators.

The event  will open on 14 October with the screening of The Illusion of a Quiet Night, a documentary by Olga Chernykh which won the Special Mention of the Burning Lights section at Visions du Réel. The film, shot in one single night, in July 2025, by 40 filmmakers and hundreds of citizens, offers a collective portrait of everyday life in wartime Ukraine.

The main programme includes Valentyn Vasyanovych’s To the Victory!, winner of Toronto’s Platform Prize last year. This work, which completes the director's dystopian trilogy (following Atlantis and Reflection) imagines a post-war Kyiv where a filmmaker struggles to rebuild his life while his family remains abroad.

In this year’s Berlinale Panorama Audience Award winner Traces, Alisa Kovalenko and co-director Marysia Nikitiuk document the experiences of Ukrainian women subjected to sexual violence and torture during the war, while in the Venice Giornate degli Autori entry Camouflage, a debut feature by Mykyta Gibalenko, war is explored through the prism of distance. Silent Flood, a documentary by Dmytro Sukholytkyi-Sobchuk (Pamfir), follows a pacifist religious community in western Ukraine facing both recurring floods and the consequences of the Russian invasion.

The other  selected films are The Last Prometheus of Donbas by Anton Shtuka, Where Everything Disappears by Oleksandr Tkachenko and The Blessed Ones by Andrii Lysetskyi.

The festival will close on 18 October with the documentary Don't Ask Me If I Killed by Helena Maksyom, which follows the filmmaker's transformation from civilian to soldier and presents her reflections on the moral consequences of war.

Beyond contemporary productions, UFFB will devote considerable attention to cinema history. The retrospective “Donbas on Screen: Rethinking History, Memory and War” will revisit films including Dziga Vertov's Enthusiasm (Donbas Symphony) (1930), Leonid Lukov's I Love (1936) and Serhii Paradzhanov's Flower on the Stone (1962). A special programme marking the 85th anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre will screen The Undefeated (1945) by Mark Donskoi and Spell Your Name (2006) by Sergey Bukovsky. Meanwhile, Crimea Isolation, presented on 18 October, tackles repression and restrictions on freedom of expression in occupied Crimea through personal testimonies.

Other strands include “Ukraine Known Unknown”, dedicated to overlooked Ukrainian cultural figures, a selection of animated horror films from the late Soviet and early independence periods, and a screening of an episode of the 1990s erotic television series Island of Love, presented in collaboration with the Ukrainian streaming platform Takflix.

The Ukrainian Film Festival Berlin, founded in 2020, continues to combine contemporary filmmaking with the rediscovery of Ukraine's cinematic heritage, providing a platform for filmmakers, historians and audiences to discuss the country's cultural identity in a European context.