How do you describe your home in a language that isn't your own, in a country that doesn’t belong to you? Uprooted from her native Ukraine by the war, the director is forced to learn to rename the world in the words of the Portugal that welcomed her. Violent fragments of sounds and images from the country she has left behind are juxtaposed with childlike images from the books she uses to learn Portuguese: a bid to bridge the gap between the still-living past of Kyiv and the surreal present of Lisbon. Foreign letters, words, and sounds are as much attempts to describe the fury of the conflict as they are failures to communicate the suffering of exile and doubt about the future. (SC)

competition : International Short and Medium-Length Competition

Smoke of the Fire