The Docudays UA International Human Rights Film Festival is held annually. For the second time, the festival will be held online. In addition to competitive and non-competitive programmes, the festival also hosts meetings with directors, discussions of the human rights sector and much more. So follow the news on the website.

Main photo: "This Rain Will Never Stop" by Alina Gorlova

The main digital venue of the Festival will be the online cinema DOCUSPACE, where you can join festival discussions and workshops, as well as watch more than 80 films.

Since last year, according to the organisers, the platform has undergone significant changes. First, paid watching of selected movies. Secondly, from now on it will be more than the usual VOD-platform (video on demand), like Netflix:

Everyone could have a "personal room", it is possible to make a schedule, share favourite movies with friends, communicate with directors - that is, there is many opportunities to hold the festival at home.

Victoria Leshchenko the programme director of the festival

At DocuSpace.org, as well as for a regular festival you can buy a season ticket that gives you the right to use all the features of the service from all over Ukraine, and you can buy tickets for individual movies (price - from 30 to 90 hryvnia).

18th Docudays UA is dedicated to the human right to health. The organisers offer a closer look at how the pandemic has changed each of us and society, and assess the scale of these changes.

This year, everyone was unanimous, because the virus has changed our lives a lot, taught us to communicate less. And it seems to me that full recovery is what we are all waiting for. I don't know how quickly it will be achieved, but it's even more interesting to talk about it.

Roman Bondarchuk, art director of Docudays UA

Docudays has a lot of amateur movies and animations. There will be a Ukrainian-Scottish programme of vernacular (amateur) cinema "Troubadours of Cinema: Scotland and Ukraine". Amateur short films will be accompanied by interactive subtitles - professional comments from researchers, to deepen the understanding of the context of the times, experiences and eras of the film. Scotland represents the Western world with its upholding of the right to privacy and freedom of opinion, while Ukraine bears the imprint of a long period spent as a part of the Soviet Union’s totalitarian regime.

The programme consists of two selections of short documentaries: Scottish and Ukrainian. Both cover the period from the early 1940s in Scotland to the late 1980s in Ukraine, focusing on essential generalisations - techniques and elements typical for Scottish film amateurism, and the evolution of a Ukrainian amateur author, starting from traditional diary entries to poetic statements.

"Boris Peter. Silent Pause" is a programme dedicated to the memory of a talented Ukrainian sound director who died in the fall of 2020. Among the films are the famous "Ukrainian Sheriffs" by Roman Bondarchuk and "My Father Eugene" by Andriy Zagdansky about the long-term director of the Kyivnaukfilm studio.

Krzysztof Kieślowski's documentary retrospective is also waiting for the audience - this genre was preferred by the famous Polish director and owner of "Golden Bear" before he started making feature films ("Decalogue", "Three Colours"). The show will be held in partnership with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, and the programme will be directed by Polish director Agnieszka Holland, who was personally friends of Keslowski and was his screenwriter.

The Ukrainian festival of contemporary animation and media art Linoleum will show at Docudays two blocks of short animation from around the world, in particular, about mental illness.

Competition programmes (DOCU / WORLD, DOCU / UKRAINE and DOCU / IN BRIEF) will be evaluated by a jury consisting of foreign and Ukrainian experts, documentarians, human rights activists and human rights defenders.

One of the ten nominated films will receive the "RIGHTS NOW!" Award. It will be presented to a creative documentary that explores the modern world and makes a significant contribution to the discussion of human dignity, freedom and equality.

Upon completion, Docudays UA traditionally presents the best films of the programme in the regions of Ukraine as part of the Travelling Festival.