LULL
An Environmental Film Program

Wild Flowers

Available within Ukraine only

Original title: Divlje cvijeće

Director: Karla Crnčević

Croatia, Spain, 11 minutes, 2022, experimental documentary

Logline
“My father used a camera just once in his lifetime. After 30 years, he asked me to digitize the VHS material he filmed. I was wondering what he remembers.” Connecting politics with intimate spaces, Wild Flowers questions both the influence of war on private archives and the role of gardens as places of new beginnings.

About director
Karla Crnčević is a dramaturge and film worker exploring the politics of images and sound through various formats and work conditions. Her video and film works have been exhibited and awarded in various countries. She is one of the founders of the Unseen festival, which focuses on revitalizing cinema spaces. She holds an MA in Dramaturgy (Academy of Drama Arts, Zagreb) and Filmmaking (EQZE, San Sebastian).

Dust is a whale, is sunlight

Available within Ukraine only

Director: María Casas Castillo 

Belgium, Hungary, Portugal, 21 minutes, 2023, documentary

Logline
A whale existed 5 million years ago. Mark found her skeleton and decided to reassemble the pieces in a dusty basement of the Science Museum in Brussels. A filmmaker found Mark and decided to film him, the whale, and the dust. While these bones are put back together, like pieces from a puzzle, we try to imagine how life was 5 million years ago, a time before humans existed, but the sea and the sun were already here.

About director
María Casas Castillo is a Mexican filmmaker and PhD candidate at LUCA School of Arts (Belgium). She graduated from the Docnomads Joint Master’s at the University of Manchester. Her fascination with nature led her to direct her first short film, How to see the night (Como ver a noite), which premiered in 2022 at Sheffield Docfest. María’s next short, The whales I don’t see but are out there (Las ballenas que no veo pero ahí están), premiered in 2023 at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala. She currently lives in Brussels, where she makes films as an excuse to look for hidden worlds and the creatures who inhabit them. 

I Am a Rock

Director: Teta Tsybulnyk

Music: Maksym Razdobudko

Ukraine, Estonia, 4 minutes, 2024, experimental

Logline
Hiiumaa Island, Estonia. About 455 million years ago, a meteorite fell here, forming a crater 4 kilometers in diameter. This event is now represented by a landmark, a 1:100 scale model field of the Kärdla meteorite crater. In the middle of the field, there is a rock — or perhaps two rocks? One is an object of the speechless wilderness: a rock is a rock is a rock. The other is a signifier, an agent of the symbolic domain that participates in language and claims to be a meteorite. Playing with Magritte’s The Treachery of Images and a song by Simon & Garfunkel, the work delves into the paradoxical relationship between nature, language, and representation.

About director
Teta Tsybulnyk is an artist and practicing psychoanalyst born in Kyiv, Ukraine. She studied sociology at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, social anthropology at the Central European University, and clinical psychology at the Ukrainian Catholic University. In 2017, she co-founded ruїns collective and has since collaborated on a series of video works exploring more-than-human perspectives on landscape. In her current practice, Teta cross-pollinates artistic and psychoanalytic sensibilities, working with moving image, text, and event. Her research is centered on the unconscious of landscape, dreamwork, and the (im)possibilities of language.

a steppe with rabbits and pheasants running around, and where some even saw foxes

Original title: степ, де бігають зайці, фазани, а дехто навіть бачив лисиць

Director: Daryna Mamaisur

Sound: Anna Khvyl

Ukraine, 11 minutes, 2020, experimental

Synopsis
This video takes its title from a 2018 Google Maps review of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, imagining a future where industry gives way to steppe and wildlife. The work reflects on the industrial landscape of the Donbas region and the symbolic order built around it by taking a “step back” to the pre-industrial landscape and the transformations brought by late 19th- and early 20th-century industrialization. It includes fragments from the Soviet propaganda film Pearl of the Steppe (1931), which documents the scientific “conquest” of the steppe and reflects on the extractivist nature of Soviet agricultural programs. The video was filmed in the “Stone Tombs” nature reserve near Mariupol, part of the Ukrainian Natural Steppe Reserve. Since 2022, the “Stone Tombs” has remained under Russian occupation.

About director
Daryna Mamaisur is a visual artist and filmmaker born in Kyiv, Ukraine. Her practice combines art research, filmmaking, and photography, focusing on transformations of landscape and public space in relation to visual culture, memory, and political ecology. Her recent projects are personal and experimental films on migration, the limits of language, and the complex, intertwined realities of environment and war. In 2022, she graduated from the DocNomads, a joint master’s program in documentary filmmaking, based in Lisbon, Budapest, and Brussels. Her films and video works have been screened at international festivals such as Visions du Réel, FIDMarseille, Kassel Dokfest, DOK Leipzig, and RIDM, as well as in art exhibitions addressing environmental and societal issues.

Aralkum

Directors: Mila Zhluktenko, Daniel Asadi Faezi

Uzbekistan, Germany, 14 minutes, 2022, documentary

Logline

A desert landscape, as if from another planet. A few lonely, rusty shipwrecks. Low desert scrub grows around them, holding the sand together during the merciless storms. Aralkum, the Aral Desert, is the bare seabed, the last thing left of the Aral Sea. By weaving together different cinematic textures, the short film Aralkum re-imagines the dried-up Aral Sea, allowing an old fisherman to set sail one last time.

About directors

Mila Zhluktenko was born in Kyiv, Ukraine. She studied documentary filmmaking at HFF Munich. Her films have been screened at a number of international festivals, including the Semaine de la Critique in Cannes, the Berlinale, IDFA, the San Sebastián Film Festival, MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, and Visions du Réel. Since 2021, Mila Zhluktenko has also been a member of the Munich-based film magazine Revü. And in 2023, she joined Filmfest Munich as a Program Scout.

Daniel Asadi Faezi is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Munich. Studied in the Documentary Department at the University of Television and Film, Munich, and the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan. Besides directing, he produces documentary and experimental cinema. His films screened at numerous film festivals, including Locarno, DOK Leipzig, Visions du Réel, and Ann Arbor. He is a Berlinale Talents alumnus.

Deas As a Dodo

Director: Leena Habiballa

Sudan, 5 minutes, 2022, experimental

Logline 
Dead As A Dodo lays bare the settler colonial mythology at the heart of the popular narrative of the Dodo’s extinction. By drawing on archival material and the Dodo’s apparition, the film performs a sensory haunting, reviving the spaces between life and death that have been shaped by settler violence into a value-forming exercise. This work is inspired by and is in conversation with a book of poems titled A Theory of Birds by the Palestinian-American poet Zaina Alsous.

About director
Leena Habiballa is a cultural worker with an interest in Sudanese visual/material cultures and community filmmaking/exhibition models. She explores these themes through art/film criticism, research, and her own filmmaking practice. She is currently a member of the artist workers’ cooperative not-nowhere and is the winner of the 2023 Michael O’Pray Prize.