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In this film, Khrystyna Bunii travels solo across remote south-west Ukraine in pursuit of her anthropological research. As she encounters people and digitises their family photo archives, conversations and interconnections emerge. Conducting visual research into the trans-national region of Hutsulshchyna, Bunii pursues a political practice of self-narration from the margins of representation.

The sequences of this poetic journey do not simply elucidate the history of the region, but rather call for an associative labour from researcher and spectator alike, and finding people who want to talk about the region’s past is not an easy task. Made through close collaboration between the film’s directors and protagonist, Weightless combines observational and direct cinema style with staged performance and elements of documentary-essay.

We are interested in the complicated entanglements of eastern European countries – we want to know what can be learned and reclaimed from these histories and narratives, and how they shape people’s intersubjective experiences. We see these narratives as a part of a shared political space, and as a catalyst for imagining alternative ways of living and working together.

Khrystyna’s practice is an example of writing this history from below, in her home region, with a grassroots methodology. She works on a human scale and her methods are non-totalising, concerned with the lives of ordinary people. Her archiving forms a collective memory, and a call not to forget but to live with the joy and difficulty of Hutsulshchyna’s history.

Dinner: 18:00
Film Screening: 20:00
Panel Discussion: 21:15
Entrance: FREE

About the Filmmakers

Marta Hryniuk (b.1991 Poland) and Nick Thomas (b.1990 UK) are visual artists and filmmakers based in Rotterdam, Netherlands. They have worked together since 2019 collaborating on films, as well as leading workshops, programming, and assisting others in video and sound production.

Hryniuk and Thomas are founding members of WET film – a production and distribution cooperative for film, video and artists’ moving image, and are members of Filmwerkplaats, an artist-run lab for 16mm film processing.

They have presented their work internationally, predominantly as video and film installations. ‘Weightless’ is their first feature length film. Their film ‘Forces’ is in the Eye Experimental collection.

Before relocating to Rotterdam, both artists combined their individual practises with cultural organising. Hryniuk co-founded an artist-run space Silverado (2013-17, Poznań); Thomas worked as programme assistant at LUX Scotland, and a committee member at Transmission Gallery Glasgow.