Every year, as the festival season begins, regional coordinators of the Docudays UA Traveling Festival gather in Kyiv to immerse themselves in the new programme and the special atmosphere that brings together engaged audiences, documentary filmmakers, civil society activists, and human rights defenders from across the country.

At the meeting on June 6, the regional coordinators began preparing for the new season of the Traveling Festival, which will start bringing outstanding documentary films to communities in 19 regions of Ukraine as early as October. Screenings and events will take place both in person and online, with filmmakers and protagonists of the films taking part, and will continue through the end of November.

Svitlana Smal, Executive Director of the NGO Docudays, introduced the theme of the 23rd festival, “Simple Structures,” while Yuliya Kovalenko, Programme Director, and Anastasiya Balyka, Director of the Human Rights Department, presented the film programme and discussion panels that will revolve around the idea of participatory democracy.

Traveling Festival project managers Kateryna Sinhurova and Inna Kondratieva shared their reflections on last year’s Traveling Festival and on organising the festival’s traveling and online spaces.

This year’s festival symbolically began with the launch of a double pendulum — a simple mechanical structure whose trajectory leaves behind an unpredictably intricate trace. Likewise, concepts that seem familiar and straightforward at first glance, such as human rights, equality, and democracy, can take distorted, chaotic, or even entirely opposite forms in practice. Because of the deceptively simple structures on which our society rests, they are particularly vulnerable to manipulation. That is why the focus of the human rights programme is to seek a fresh critical perspective on structures in need of systemic change and to develop practices of resilience.