This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Privacy Overview
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
3rd Party Cookies
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!
Director's Statement
The idea of the film came to me from the moment my grandfather and grandmother passed away and I didn't have any more time to ask my questions about our family and my country's Soviet past. The silence of the past generations about their own history made me create this film – as a question about the history of my family and my country's post-Soviet society.
As a young Ukrainian, I was expecting social changes in the society. Something extremely big. And I was imagining it to be a part of that social explosion in the country, which came in 2013-2014 in the form of the Revolution of Dignity. In addition, I was interested in describing the atmosphere of the new era of the oligarchs and the society's values which, at the time, had been changing drastically, sometimes in a very brutal way.
As a filmmaker, I was always interested in the topic of disappearance, vanishing, departure, and parting with something really valuable. That refers to the disappearance of the whole system of social relations between people, erasing the past of a person or the state due to changes in a social structure; it is a farewell to these elusive things that would never come back. I was amazed to witness the vanishing of Ukrainian villages, and I felt the need to capture it all, to pay tribute to the past and catch a part of the culture that was fading.
STEPNE is an elegiac tale with silence as one of the main characters. It's the stillness that covers the endless Ukrainian steppes and echoes in the sounds of the past generations.