Черкаси

Lichter is an episodic tale from Hans-Christian Schmid about the life on the border between Germany and Poland. The film sheds light on the everyday stories of escape and desperateness.

Ukraine, 1946. Orest, commander of an insurgent squad, is in a hideout together with his pregnant wife Eva and several fighters. The NKVD surrounds the insurgents. The captain of the commissariat squad gives Orest a choice: he either gives Eva out or accepts an unequal fight.

Year 1947. Commander of UPA Danylo Chervonyi gets into the terrible slaughter of Stalin's camps, where he must go through hell and inhumane prison conditions, prosecution of criminal leaders, meanness, betrayal and despair. Danylo finds the strength to resist repression of the camp commander and makes a desperate attempt to break free, raising the first rebel in the camp.

The film is based on the biographical events of the Crimeans' leader, human rights activist, Soviet political prisoner and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Mustafa Jemilev. Summer of 1980. Mustafa Jemilev spends a four-year exile in Yakut village Zyryanka, where he works at an oxygen station. Every day he fills rusty tanks with oxygen and rolls them to the dock. This monotonous and exhausting work makes him resembled to the mythological Sisyphus. The events happen after 300-days hunger strike, which made him known all around the globe.

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine has changed the lives of every Ukrainian. Formerly bankers, IT workers, cultural figures and others have become military personnel and volunteers, people resisting the greatest threat to peaceful life in all of Europe.

Human history, which is against the will was drawn into historical conflicts.

Nina, 30, a Ukrainian language teacher who can't leave the city of Luhansk, occupied by separatists in Eastern Ukraine, is forced to undergo retraining courses for teaching Russian. Andrii, 17, is a student who was orphaned in the aftermath of the war. They cross paths when Nina witnesses Andrii being arrested by the police after hanging the Ukrainian flag from the roof of his school. Nina knows that because they live in a world of injustice and lies Andrii can stay in jail for a long time, and she risks her life to free him. As they gravitate towards each other, they try to remind people in the occupied territories that they deserve a future, too.

A Ukrainian woman comes back to her native village leaving her working life in Italy behind.

The film tells about the tragic date in the history of the Crimean Tatar people — May 18, 1944 — Stalin’s deportation of the Crimean Tatars. The plot of the film — a pilot, twice Hero of the Soviet Union, Amethan Sultan. In May, 1944, a year after liberation of Sevastopol Amethan goes on vacation to his native town Alupka. On May 18 his eyes witness begining of deportation of the Crimean Tatars.

A nurse from Ukraine searches for a better life in the West, while an unemployed security guard from Austria heads East for the same reason. Both are looking for work, a new beginning, an existence, struggling to believe in themselves, to find a meaning in life...

The story of trust and its absence against the background of events unfolding in Eastern Ukraine in early 2014. The main topic is revealed through the prism of the Luhansk border base, whose fighters the separatists and Russian special services tried unsuccessfully force to betray their country.