RODNYE (CLOSE RELATIONS)

Russian citizen and Soviet-born Ukrainian native Vitaly Mansky crisscrosses Ukraine to explore country’s society after the Maidan revolution as mirrored within his own large Ukrainian family. They live scattered all across the country: in Lviv, Odessa, the separatist area in Donbass, and Sevastopol on Crimea. The film is looking for reasons of the conflict after which citizens of a single country found themselves on different sides of the barricades. The main narrative takes place in the here and now. But below the main narrative there is a strong historical undercurrent. This undercurrent will carry information about the Russian-Ukrainian conflict’s deep roots in centuries of close ties between the two countries.