A Home for Rita

Yulia Appen – A Home for Rita

18th December 2025 – 31st January 2026

Open on Fridays (2-6pm) and by appointment

Address: WET, Hillevliet 90 (3rd floor), Rotterdam

We are concluding our 2025 programme with a presentation of A Home for Rita (2025, 53 mins, Ukrainian, Romani, Russian with English subtitles) by Yulia Appen. The film intimately portrays a family of Roma IDPs (internally displaced people) in East Ukraine as they try to build a new life after their homes are lost to Russian occupation. The film was made over many months, through the sharing of life experiences and struggles, and reflects the friendship and relationships of mutual care between the director and her protagonists.

A Home for Rita follows a Roma family that were forced to flee the Russian occupation in spring 2022. The film centres Roma women’s direct experiences of the war, drawing on their playful, imaginative commentary. The narrative revolves around the housing problem for displaced Romas, and their search for a home and a sense of belonging. In Zaporizhzhia, located 40 kilometres from the frontline, the protagonists face discrimination and neglect. The film documents Roma people’s reflections on Ukraine and their own complex identity during the full-scale invasion and in the context of the resistance to Russian aggression.

Yulia Appen is a documentary filmmaker and photographer. Her films explore the topics of home and boundaries, seen through a personal lens, as well as landscape as a carrier of sociocultural and historical conditions. Since February 2022, she has been working as a journalist for a volunteer channel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine documenting life during wartime and the stories of people who survived occupation. Together with Freefilmers she has produced a series of interviews with anti-authoritarian fighters (in collaboration with Solidarity Collectives) and engaged in humanitarian work supporting Roma, and other marginalised communities in war-affected villages.