TvorchSkhid. Underground films from Ukraine

Freefilmers is a non-governmental organisation, a cine-movement, and a union of like-minded filmmakers. The main focus of their films are human life, struggle for equality and freedom. The organisation promotes independent filmmaking in Ukraine, especially in its eastern part, and works towards the decentralisation of cultural processes.

Unrestricted and heterogenous, the videos of Freefilmers are characterised by engaging storytelling techniques, a heightened sensitivity and sincere engagement with places they portrait. They avoid preconceived categories, bridging socially engaged documentary with intimate and diaristic moments, high camp and scripted modes of narration. Throughout these works, there emerge concerns particular to their geographic and socio-political location. Freefilmers come from Mariupol, and their work is informed and fuelled by the marginalised and violated spaces of eastern Ukraine, especially in the context of the Russian occupation and the on-going war. Those specificities however, touch on more universal and global issues concerning peripheral, marginalised and anti-colonial spaces.

The screening accompanies Freefilmers’ residency co-hosted by WET film and WORM Filmwerkplaats. The residency in October 2021 is focused on discussions between the two ‘sister’ collectives, research and the production of a collaborative film using the facilities of WORM Filmwerkplaats. The conversations between WET and Freefilmers oscillate around self-organising, sustainable and radical forms of collaborative film-making and distribution.

WET film’s programming in 2021/2022 focuses on place, as a response to our new communal studio space at De Hillevliet, and to the way that notions of locality have been reconfigured by the pandemic. We are interested in exploring together, through discussing and making, the complex relationships with place. Freefilmers’ work is rooted in their locale, in eastern Ukraine, but also subverts dominant representations of it in media and culture. By bringing them to Rotterdam, we can explore what their work says about this place – what differences we can learn from – and provide a new perspective for audiences here in the Netherlands.

The NGO was founded in 2018 in Mariupol, Ukraine. Since then Freefilmers have had multiple screenings of their works across Ukraine, as well as in Slovakia, Germany, and Lithuania, and produced a cinematographic project ‘Creative East-2’ (2019) consisting of three films about Ukrainian working class creative practices. In September 2021 they co-organised first edition of the Feminist Film Festival Filma in Ukraine focusing on transgender and antiracist activist films.