CM 2021

Horishni Plavni City Council 

RADAR Films

Ukrainian Cultural Foundation

Ground Zero

НИЖНІЙ ГОРИЗОНТ

Pitch video

Synopsis Marina, a 33-year-old Ukrainian woman, lives in Paris and writes her PhD at Sorbonne University about mono-industrial towns, a phenomenon of Soviet industrialisation &mdash; a type of settlement built for the needs of one giant factory. In the 90s her mother took her, left Ukraine and moved to France after the tragic death of her husband, a miner.Marina is offered a dream job, but to get it she has to go do research in her native provincial Ukrainian town next to an open-cast mining factory called Kombinat. She hasn&rsquo;t been there for 25 years, so she believes that her origin is a &ldquo;VIP pass&rdquo; in her research. The Town was built in the 60s on the banks of Dnieper river. Its official history says it was a no man&rsquo;s land before young builders from all over the Soviet Union came and found a settlement. In 1943, during WWII, a bloody military campaign that was a part of the battle on the Dnieper river took place here among the floodplains.Marina&rsquo;s work leads her to a close acquaintance with the rules and real-life of this town, its inhabitants and, most importantly, with Roman, grandson of the Hero of the Soviet Union, a soldier whose bones were recently found in the floodplains among the remnants of the old battle. He is young and charming, an excavator driver from Kombinat, but with an orphanage background and a rebellious criminal past. For the first time in his life Roman is becoming somehow special and honoured, and now he is trying to be a &ldquo;decent member of the society&rdquo;.Marina goes deeper in her desire to learn the true history of this land and the roots of her father. But the process of digging through the archives suddenly reveals new controversial facts about the found soldier, the biggest pride of the locals, and thus she becomes a threat for the Town.She faces a very difficult personal choice: to reveal the controversial truth and thus ruin the home grounds of the man she fell in love with or to overstep her own beliefs and maybe even take the side of the Town.Director&rsquo;s Biography Zhanna Ozirna (1986) is Ukrainian director and screenwriter working between two cities &mdash; Kyiv and Lviv. She is an alumna of 2020 Berlinale Talents. Her last short fiction film The Adult was presented in the special programme The State of a New Generation within the 2020 Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur. In 2017 she received the Oppose Othering grant program within goEast Film Festival (Wiesbaden, Germany) with her short documentary Bond that received an award as the Best Ukrainian Film (2019 86 International Film Festival) and a Jury Special Mention (2018 Odesa International Film Festival). Now Zhanna works as lecturer at the Ukrainian Catholic University at the Media Communications Master&rsquo;s Program, guest program coordinator of short film festivals, and runs a blog on film dramaturgy &ldquo;All About Storytelling&rdquo;.Goals at CineMart Our main goal is to find reliable partners who can feel the authentic story of the film and will discover it with us. We see co-production not only as a financial contribution but also as a long journey of joint experience and professional exchange. Therefore, we are seeking an international co-producer who can bring up to 20% of the budget and will be able to participate in the development of the project. In addition, we are ready to work with foreign directors of photography and composers, also we would consider international post-production. Besides that, we are seeking international distributors and sales agents. Currently, all territories are open.

Marina, a researcher, decides to live in the reality she has studied only in theory so far. But she doesn’t know that she can easily be absorbed by the object of her research.