Zoia Laktionova
3 September 2021
Zoia Laktionova was born in 1984 in Mariupol. She first appeared in the world of documentary cinema as the heroine of Mariia Stoianova’s film Ma (2017), and a year later made her first short documentary, Diorama, about a mined sea. The film won an award in the MyStreetFilms category at the 86 Festival and participated in numerous European film festivals (DOK Leipzig, Ji.Hlava, Cottbus, etc) and was released in Ukrainian cinemas in 2019.
In 2021, she presented her new short film The Territory of Empty Windows at Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, and also screened it in cinemas at Molodist IFF in Kyiv. The international premiere took place at the MakeDox, Northern Macedonia.
The artist now lives in Kyiv and works as an independent documentary film director. She works with themes of war, memory and personal stories.
The Territory of Empty Windows
Video, 10’09’’, 2020
This documentary is about people who, for various reasons, remain living in the ‘gray zone’ and become invisible victims of the war in eastern Ukrainian. They do not show up in the official war statistics. These people die quietly. And it is not shrapnel and shells that kill them, but stress. The artist tells the story of these people through an interview with her mother. War and neglected ecology are two themes that permeate the everyday life of Mariupol residents. World War II and the factory were the reasons that Zoia’s mother’s family moved to Mariupol. But now the war with Russia along with the environmental consequences of the plant’s operation play a dramatic role in her future life.