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In the Studio: Film-maker Iryna Tsilyk: Animating Ukraine’s war

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Iryna Tsilyk

05/12/2023 GMT

Film-maker Iryna Tsilyk: Animating Ukraine’s war

BBC World Service - In the Studio, Film-maker Iryna Tsilyk: Animating Ukraine’s war

How the war is transforming the work of this Ukrainian documentary maker

Iryna Tsilyk has won awards for her documentaries in east Ukraine. However after Russia’s full-scale invasion she’s decided to tell her own story in a new way - through animation.

Iryna Tsilyk is one of Ukraine’s best known young documentary makers. She made her name following the lives of soldiers, female paramedics and families living on the frontline in East Ukraine after the region was taken over by Moscow-backed separatists. However after Russia’s full-scale invasion brought the war to Iryna’s home city of Kyiv, she decided she could no longer stay behind the camera.  So, in her current project, The Red Zone, Iryna is turning the lens on herself and her family.

Iryna’s husband, Artem Chekh, is a well-known novelist and journalist. He volunteered to join the army and found himself in Bakhmut, scene of some of the bloodiest fighting.  For five days Iryna did not know if he was alive or dead. She is focusing on the anguish she felt over this period and using a series of flashbacks to illustrate their past lives in peacetime.

Iryna tells Lucy Ash that to give herself more artistic freedom she has decided on a radical new tool for her work:  this film will be an animation. Making films in wartime is a challenge and animation is expensive but Iryna has foreign backers and is determined to tell her own story in her own way. 

Presented and produced by Lucy Ash
Executive Producer: Andrea Kidd for the BBC World Service

(Photo: Iryna Tsilyk. Credit: Julia Weber)

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