When the third annual Sunny Bunny LGBTQIA+ film festival opens in Kyiv on April 18, it will do so in the face of a severe funding crisis due to the cancellation of financial support from USAID by US president Donald Trump.
USAID’s ‘Transformation Communications Activity’ programme previously cooperated with the Ukrainian government, private sector and civil society to strengthen Ukraine’s democracy. One of the beneficiaries was Sunny Bunny, an event which evolved in 2023 out of the queer film strand of the city’s long running Molodist Film Festival.
“The main challenge has been the budget,” says festival director Bohdan Zhuk of this year’s edition. “We don’t have the American funding we had before.
“In addition, a lot of international organisations that work with human rights or LGBTQIA+ groups have not been able to support because they have run out of funding for projects in Ukraine,” Zhuk adds. “This means we can’t hire so many people to work for the festival and are able to bring fewer people to Kyiv.
“We get some funding from the Ukrainian State Film Agency, and that’s important to show that the government is supporting the festival officially,” he continues. “But it’s very disappointing that we don’t get anything from the City of Kyiv, which hasn’t been supporting any festivals over the past three years since the invasion.”
The festival is working with a budget of €40,000 compared to €80,000 in 2024. It has attached partners including the embassies in Kyiv of Spain, Italy and Argentina alongside the Czech Centre, French Institute and European Union. British Council has also collaborated on a retrospective of six classic queer films from the UK, including Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio and Andrew Haigh’s Weekend. Zhuk is hopeful further private donors might also be found.
The festival cannot make up the shortfall in funding by relying on ticket sales alone. “A ticket costs on average €4 but we can’t put this price up because we have a difficult economic situation in Ukraine at the moment,” says Zhuk. “We want the people to come and see the films.”
Sunny Bunny showcases Ukrainian and international queer cinema. It opens this year with Olga Gibelinda’s Ukraine documentary Queens Of Joy, which premiered at the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival last month.
It will also include screenings of Truong Minh Quy’s Viet And Nam, which premiered at Cannes, and Darren Thornton’s London Film Festival award winner Four Mothers, which opens this weekend in the UK and Ireland.
The challenges of mounting an LGBTQIA+ festival in Kyiv have always been significant, even before the Russian invasion. While Sunny Bunny has never been directly targeted, memories are fresh of an incident during the 2014 Molodist festival when the historic Zhovten cinema was the victim of an arson attack during the Molodist screening of Mario Fanfani’s French title Summer Nights.
The cinema received threats for hosting the first edition of Sunny Bunny in June 2023, with police needing to guard the cinema and the festivalgoers during the festival.
Last year, the Zhovten cinema’s facade was sprayed with homophobic graffiti ahead of the screening of Ukrainian film Lessons Of Tolerance by Arkady Neptalyuk, about a working-class family aiming to overcome its homophobia and prejudice.
The festival provides security training for the volunteers and staff, who are also equipped to meet the threat of air raids and evacuations.
“We ask police to patrol more actively when screenings are taking place, so that they are able to react quickly if there was an incident,” says Zhuk.
The ongoing conflict has also brought other more personal challenges, says Zhuk, whose brother was killed fighting on the frontline earlier this year.
“One of my colleagues was drafted in January, and another one is joining the army now, so that means there is much more work for the others in our small team, and especially for those doing the programming.”
Sunny Bunny, main competition 2025
Eat The Night
Dir: Caroline Poggi
Viet And Nam
Dir: Truong Minh Quy
Sad Jokes
Dir: Fabian Stumm
Queens Of Drama
Dir: Alexis Langlois
Four Mothers
Dir: Darren Thornton
High Tide
Dir: Marco Calvani
Sauna
Dir: Mathias Broe
Night Stage
Dirs: Filipe Matzembacher, Marcio Reolon
Skinny Love
Dir: Sigurour Anton
Endless
Dir: Wojciech Pus
Cactus Pears
Dir: Rohan Kanawade
Out Of Competition
Queens Of Joy
Dir: Olha Gibelinda
No comments yet