Zhanna Ozirna’s drama Honeymoon, one of the few fiction films conceived and completed in Ukraine during the ongoing Russian invasion has been acquired for world sales by UK based Reason8.
Ozirna’s feature debut is making its world premiere as part of Venice’s Biennale College Cinema screenings after being financed through the low-budget Biennale College initiative. It was also pitched at synopsis stage during Trieste’s WEMW 2023 and took part in the Connecting Cottbus pitching session in 2023.
Honeymoon, produced by Dmytro Sukhanov of Toy Cinema, stars Ira Nirsha and Roman Lutskyi as a couple who wake up in their apartment hearing explosions and discover Russian troops have set up headquarters in their building and they are trapped without electricity, water or internet.
“The situation happened to many different people [in real life],” said Ozirna, who is renowned for her short films including The Adult and Bond.
The writer-director drew specifically on the experiences of a friend and his family.
“The Russians came and settled in their yard and then they just couldn’t escape,” she explained. “Their situation was pretty unique because for one week they were in this apartment and right under their feet there were Russians. They heard everything.”
As a two-hander about “two people in one apartment,” Honeymoon was a manageable project to shoot in Ukraine despite the war. It was made in a studio set in Kyiv and therefore didn’t require permission for location shooting.
“We shot in March [2024],” said Ozirna. “There were blackouts and shelling. Sometimes, when we were shooting, we’d go out for lunch and there would be a ballistic missile air raid siren. We were in a very fragile situation. When we started a day, we didn’t know if some of the members of the crew would be stopped at a checkpoint or something like that.”
Ozirna originally intended to make another project, Ground Zero, as her feature debut. Also produced by Sukhanov, one of Ukraine’s most experienced producers, the drama has received support from the European Solidarity Fund for European Films and is being made as a coproduction with France’s Good Fortune Films. It is about an academic who returns to Ukraine from France hoping to find out why her father, a miner during the Soviet era, committed suicide.
Ground Zero has been in development for around five years and received a promise of backing from the Ukrainian state film agency. But funding was frozen after the invasion. “It’s about collective and historical memory, a theme that happens to be very relevant just now,” says Ozirna of what she hopes will be her next project.
No comments yet