La Palisiada

Ukraine, 1996. 5 months before the moratorium on capital punishment, two old friends, a police detective and a forensic psychiatrist, investigate a murder of their colleague. Long time ago, both of them were in love with the widow of the deceased. Immersed in the complicated case and long forgotten memories, they create a future where their children have to live, inheriting unrealized aspirations of their parents.

From a family of filmmakers, Philip SOTNYCHENKO (1989, Ukraine) is a director, producer and co-founder of Contemporary Ukrainian Cinema, a collective of young independent filmmakers. He studied film and TV directing at Kyiv National Karpenko-Kary Theatre, and graduated in 2016. His short films, including Son(2015) and Nail (2016), have been selected at over 350 festivals and won dozens of awards. In recent years, Sotnychenko has been studying VHS archives of Ukraine in the 1990s, from which he used footage for his latest film, La Palisiada (2023), selected for IFFR 2023.