2024 | Ukraine | Short

Clubbing (2024)

  • Ukrainian English, French 37 mins
  • Director | Nataliya Ilchuk
  • Writer | Nataliya Ilchuk
  • Producer | Nataliya Ilchuk

STATUS: Released

This film is currently not available.   

Nataliya Ilchuk, a director who also became an actress for the occasion, invites us to a very unusual clubbing experience. A clubbing experience that has been hollowed out. "Who do you want to be?" asks a friend, who is filming her. After some hesitation, "I would like to be myself," she answers on camera. The film will be careful not to draw the precise contours of this "myself." We follow her in this search, as she wanders with her friend and companion, a sort of mute and inverted alter ego, for a few days in the summer of 2019 in Lviv. We do not leave the two thirty-something artists, here after an evening out, there in a karaoke bar, meeting a few characters like this half-friend, half-potential buyer of her paintings, a clue suggesting an unwelcoming off-screen space... Games, discussions, suspended sentences, the film draws moments of complicity as well as of floating between them, letting situations come. From one to the other, in a back-and-forth game, hesitations and laughter play out. In this clubbing, these two women are trying to figure out what to do, who to be. And as the final loop suggests, to film. But film what? The street? Her own? What can still be preserved in this seemingly peaceful city. Preserve the possible while in the background we can guess the war, absent, invisible but at work. For how long? A suspended situation as the finale indicates. Nicolas Feodoroff

Clubbing Self-discovery Artistic Journey Friendship Club Actress Experience Search Friend Companion Summer Occasion Karaoke Bar Artists
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