The UK premiere of two short films by Olaa Zhyzhko, a filmmaker born in Kyiv, now living and working in Paris, where she studied film direction at La Fémis. Moving between documentary and fiction, her work explores the erotic and intimate entanglements of loss and yearning through urgent, psychologically charged narratives.

Just Drifting (2025) is set in a near-future Paris at war. Night after night, Lucia, a young nurse, tends to the wounded and the dying. One evening, she sees a man walking on the water of the Seine, and a troubling desire takes hold of her. The film’s scenography, designed by the visual artist Tymur Postovyi, constructs a world that references Duchamp’s Étant donnés and the architectures of war — spaces that are at once psychological, erotic, and corroded. To drift here is not to wander the city but to move through spaces saturated by longing, where sorrow takes the form of architecture rather than speech, and home persists only as memory.

Olaa’s Ark (2023) is a documentary born from a childhood fascination with reality television and the lived experience of hiding in a bomb shelter. Drawing on the structure of shows like Big Brother, Zhyzhko brings seven strangers to live together, day and night, in a single enclosed space for seven days, entirely cut off from the outside world. Among them is the director herself, who transforms the experience into a self-directed reality show — probing the boundaries between surveillance, intimacy, and human behaviour under confinement.

Shown together, the two films trace the range of Zhyzhko’s work. In Olaa’s Ark, the self is mediated through filmmaking, the director in front of a camera, in the now recognisable mode of autofiction, negotiating her own image under its gaze. Just Drifting inverts this: an intimate, immersive portrait in which a character does not watch herself but dissolves into her circumstances.

This screening is co-organised by Dasha Anosova and Sonya Kvasha (Baby Prod) and is followed by a Q&A with Olaa Zhyzhko and Dasha Anosova.