GRANTEE
This is a hybrid documentary about post-invasion Kharkiv, told not through people on screen but through the city’s plants. Trees, weeds, and flowers in bombed-out courtyards and along cracked pavements serve as the main characters, quietly showing how life returns where everything had seemed destroyed. Viktoriia Ivanova records audio interviews with Kharkiv residents whose faces remain unseen. They speak about loss, fear, care, and the small rituals that keep them going: watering a tree; rescuing a plant from a balcony; imagining a future garden. Their voices turn vegetation from a background element into a witness and keeper of memory. Through slow observational shots and the use of gentle plant animations to supplement these stories , the film explores recovery after trauma and asks whether something as fragile as a plant can carry belonging, memory, and resistance.