We are starting the 18th Travelling Docudays UA in Poltava Region! The festival will be held in a combined format (online and offline) on 27 September — 15 October.

This year, the offline platforms for film screenings and discussions are: I. P. Kotliarevsky Poltava Regional Universal Science Library, O. Honchar Poltava Regional Youth Library, Poltava City Library Branch #4, Poltava City Library Branch #2, Lesia Ukrainka Hadiach District Library, and Hnat Stelletsky Lubne Ethnographic Museum. The online component of the festival will be hosted by the DOCUSPACE platform.

“The festival’s topic, Full Recovery, is about the human right to health. Together with the Docudays UA audience and visitors, we will discuss the way the pandemic has changed each of us and society in general. We will dive deep into the problems of the healthcare system which have been exposed by the coronavirus crisis and look for ways to solve them,” says Natalia Kiriachok, the regional coordinator of Docudays UA in Poltava and the region.

The intense film screening programme will rediscover the world, help us get immersed in complex social issues, and inspire us to change. “This year, the Travelling Docudays UA offers you to watch documentaries from 18 countries. We will see how people defend their rights in different parts of the world, learn about the problems and challenges they face,” says Hanna Kiyashchenko, head of the Poltava Branch of the Social Service of Ukraine. “Revealing our problems on screen encourages us to think and talk about solving them and taking action!”

Each screening will be followed by a discussion which will help us find answers to relevant questions, and human rights discussions and lectures with leading experts will help understand the role of civil activists in community life and the importance of critical thinking. “For me, the festival is an opportunity to feel like a part of a broad movement in which everyone is given an opportunity to be themselves,” notes Anastasia Kelym, a film screening moderator for the Travelling Docudays UA in Poltava and a manager of the Poltava Branch of the Social Service of Ukraine. “I am convinced that everyone should attend the Travelling Docudays UA. Because a documentary film is an incredible opportunity to get immersed in another person’s life, to feel how different we are, but still so close.”

The festival’s special event will be the opening of the Welcome, No Entry exhibition at the Travelling Docudays UA. It is a 3D exhibition by the photographer Oleksandr Chekmeniov, which will be presented online with two photography series created at the Ovruch mental asylum in the late 1990s: a reportage series in color and a black-and-white series of staged portraits. The exhibition will question the boundary between pathology and the norm and reveal, on the one hand, the social life and interactions in a mental hospital as a social institution, and on the other hand, the forced and unfree nature of a closed facility.