GRANTEE
The documentary project Evdokiya, the Grand Mother is a 60-80minute film featuring archival material from 2022–2023 and earlier. It tells the personal story of Evdokiya Prydybailo, a 93-year-old woman who experienced the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Like millions of other refugees, she had to leave Ukraine and passed away in exile in December 2022.
This movie tells the story of how the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, started on 24 February 2022, affected the life of the grandmother Evdokiya who had already experienced the Nazi invasion when she was a child, being separated from her family and taken to Slovakia. In March 2022, Evdokiya was transported by an ambulance from Kyiv to the Slovak town of Vojčice, which is 50 kilometers away from the border with Ukraine, covering a distance of 827 kilometers. She was one of 6.2 million Ukrainians who ended up abroad, far away from their homes and families. Born in 1929, having survived famine, the Second World War, and the Soviet occupation of Ukraine, she spent the last nine months of her life in exile and passed away on 18 December 2022. In 2023, her granddaughter brought her ashes back to Ukraine and her family to be buried in the city of Hadyach.
Evdokiya’s biography reflects almost 100 years of Ukrainian history, including famine, two wars, the Soviet period, as well as independence, protests, and revolutions. It captures crucial moments of a society that endured and resisted extreme violence. The project celebrates the strong woman, the bonds between people across borders, and the unbroken circle of life.
The material we currently have includes home recordings from Ukraine made in February-March 2022 as well as material recorded with a professional camera during our filming in Slovakia in August 2022. We also plan to use video material from the “Ukrainian War Archive” which shows the situation in Ukraine at that time. The first part was filmed in Kyiv during the initial days of the full-scale invasion, capturing Evdokiya and her granddaughter in a state of complete uncertainty and awareness of the fragility of their home. The other part was shot in Slovakia in summer 2022 when we interviewed the 93-year-old Evdokiya in her exile. In December 2022, Evdokiya passed away in a care home without having been able to return to Ukraine. The urn with her ashes was first brought to Berlin by her granddaughter. In May 2023, we traveled from Berlin to Ukraine and documented the journey of the urn and the ceremony in Hadyach.
The trailer we included with this application is an initial attempt to edit the material, providing an overview of different facets of the material. The film, however, is not yet fully edited, and we plan to include further material from family and public archives in Ukraine. Although the trailer indicates a chronological and factual approach, the final documentary does not aspire to be a reportage. Rather, we aim to create a non-linear structure for the documentary through artistic interpretation and intellectual reflection. The idea is to relate the documentary to the poetic traditions in Ukrainian films, such as A Well for the Thirsty (1965) by Yurii Illienko, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964) by Sergei Parajanov, Bread (1929) by Mykola Shpykovsky, and Earth (1930) by Oleksandr Dovzhenko.
As our journey was short—we only had one week—we intend to return to Hadyach in spring 2025 to shoot more of the surroundings. Moreover, in a local museum we found not only traditional dresses we had seen at the funeral ceremony but also a strong link to our title Evdokiya, The Grand Mother. This is what Evdokiya’s family members called her, emphasizing the importance of Evdokiya’s personality for her relatives and friends. Interestingly, the famous Ukrainian publisher and writer Olena Pchilka, born and raised in Hadyach, was also called “The Grand Mother” by the locals. We intend to include imagery of the land, fruit, and gardens in Hadyach which were important to Evdokiya and are currently under threat by the invasion. This will invite the audience to step back from daily struggle and take a look beneath the surface.