Кохання/DeepLove
2019 · 14m · Ukraine
Directed by Mykyta Lyskov
Genres: animation, documentary, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
Set in the post-Soviet city of Dnipro during Ukraine's decommunization era, this 2D animated documentary-essay surveys a fractured urban landscape through grotesque vignettes, floating plastic bags, and head-swapping citizens. A surreal, black-humored love letter to a country in chaotic transition.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A documentary masquerading as fever dream — Lyskov takes the most earnest subject (national identity, urban decay, historical rupture) and melts it into headless citizens and floating plastic bags, which is exactly the kind of subversive move that makes consensus critics uncomfortable and proves them wrong. This is what happens when you refuse the boring safety of straightforward observation.
Lyskov's formal gambit — rendering Dnipro's decommunization through crude 2D animation and Magritte-adjacent surrealism — sits in a lineage of essay-animation that dates to Kobayashi and extends through contemporary practice, though the Ukrainian context and head-swapping motif give it a singular voice that complicates rather than settles the form's relationship to documentary truth.
The decision to strip dialogue entirely and let Baibakov's score carry the emotional and narrative weight is what transforms what could be a clever concept into something that actually moves — every cut to a new grotesque vignette lands harder because there's nothing else competing for meaning, just image and sound in absolute cooperation.
Reviews
Lyskov manages to get us into a travelogue of floating plastic bags... and his crude designs of an urban community suddenly bring us closer to the characters — deeply empathetic and poignantly funny.
Peak Ukrainian surrealism, BRAVO.
Festivals
- DOK Leipzig 2019, Grand Prix
- Annecy International Animation Film Festival 2019
- PÖFF Shorts 2019
- Animocje International Animation Film Festival 2019
- Turku Animated Film Festival 2019