A touchy animated film depicting the pain a family feels while their father serves on the war front was submitted to 1+1 television channel's contest for short films on peace.
Produced to Lea Michele’s “Papa Can You Hear
Me?” it features an ordinary Ukrainian family whose father was sent to fight
Russian-backed proxies and regular army troops in the war-torn oblasts of
Donetsk and Luhansk where nearly 15 percent of the nation’s population of 45
million lived before Moscow-backed fighters invaded.
Some 1,000 servicemen have died since the
unprovoked Russian war against Ukraine escalated into military conflict in
mid-April, many of whom were fathers.
The authors of “Ukrainsky t ATO” (tato is Ukrainian for dad), Viktoriya Velychko
and Pavlo Bondarenko, tried to show the pain of absence that many Ukrainian
children experience during wartime. It shows them waiting for their father to
return home during long, cold nights while they clearly realize their lives
will never be the same.
The deadline for submitting short films no
longer than three minutes to The Next Big Thing contest is Oct. 15. On Oct. 27
a jury will select the 50 best clips, and on Nov. 4 the winner will be
announced with the top prize of a GoPro camera going to the winner.
Kyiv Post staff writer Julia Kukova can be reached at [email protected].
