Yushchenko Stole My Pants
Four punk friends from Alchevsk travel to a winter camp in Burshtyn, where they pull off a series of absurd prykoly – sawing apart a wardrobe, setting off a fire extinguisher, and dragging their friend Stepan’s bed into the bathroom. Assembled entirely from Sasha Chepeliev’s school-era video and photo archives (2005–2006) and woven together with a cycle of songs written by the director, the film becomes a funny and heartbreaking journey through adolescence, when cruelty went hand in hand with tenderness, and playing with political slogans still felt like nothing more than a game.
Valera: Man-Mountain
An experimental short assembled from YouTube videos of the director’s former classmate, TV fragments, and a 2006 graduation interview recorded in Alchevsk. What starts as an ironic play with early-2000s home-video aesthetics slowly falls apart. Through montage of personal and online material, Chepelev tries to reconnect with a man he once loved – a man whom war and time have made almost unrecognisable. Laughter loses its protective function and gives way to the impossible wish to return to a place that no longer exists.