Weightless (2023)

Khrystyna Bunii travels solo across remote south-west Ukraine in pursuit of her anthropological research. As she encounters people and digitises their family photo archives, conversations and interconnections emerge. Conducting visual research into the trans-national region of Hutsulshchyna, Bunii pursues a political practice of self-narration from the margins of representation. The sequences of this poetic journey do not simply elucidate the history of the region, but rather call for an associative labour from researcher and spectator alike, and finding people who want to talk about the region’s past is not an easy task. Made through close collaboration between the film’s directors and protagonist, Weightless combines observational and direct cinema style with staged performance and elements of documentary-essay.