Film Cycle: In Spring. Films from Ukraine | Third session: Stolen images
17 June 2026 | 19:00 – 20:30
FILM CYCLE in collaboration with Filmoteca Española: In Spring. Films from Ukraine
Curated by Roman Khimei & Yarema Malashchuk in collaboration with TBA21.
In Spring. Films from Ukraine, organized alongside the exhibition Pedagogías de guerra at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, brings together a series of short films by the artists Roman Khimei & Yarema Malashchuk and complementary works by other artists and filmmakers to explore how historical and ongoing conflicts continue to shape spaces, social relations, and individual subjectivities. The program engages with themes of youth and everyday life in conflict, historical memory and the legacy of war, as well as migration, borders, and Europe in transition. Together, these works highlight the persistent traces of past and present upheavals, showing how cinema can serve as a space to navigate the complex interplay of forgetting and remembering.
This section addresses cultural annihilation as a colonial practice that operates not only through destruction, but also through appropriation and reattribution within imperial narrative: from the historical absorption of Ukrainian avant-garde cinema into “Russian” film history to the contemporary looting of Ukrainian cultural heritage.
Date and time: June 17, 2026, 19:00h
Location: Cine Doré, Madrid
Access: Ticket sales at the box office until full capacity is reached. A quota of 10% of the capacity is reserved for entry without a prior ticket on the day of the event.
Recommended age: All audiences are welcome
Language: Original version with Spanish subtitles
Session duration: approximately 93 min
PROGRAM:
SHORT FILM BY ROMAN KHIMEI & YAREMA MALASHCHUK:
Explosions Near the Museum (UA, 2023, 14 min)
The film documents the looting of the Kherson Museum of Local Lore by Russian occupational forces between 24–26 October. The museum housed Southern Ukraine’s largest and oldest collection of antiquities, with more than 173,000 objects spanning seven thousand years, from Scythiangold to World War II weaponry. Two weeks before Kherson was liberated by Ukrainian forces, Russian occupational troops carried out a coordinated theft, stripping centuries of Ukrainian history from the museum and the region.The sound of shelling and missile strikes was recorded during filming inside the museum on December 12, less than two kilometers from Russian-occupied territory.
FEATURE FILM:
In Spring (Navesni) (Ukrainian SSR, 1929, 79 min), by Mykhaylo Kaufman
In Spring is a 1929 Soviet experimental silent documentary directed by Mikhail Kaufman, created in the context of the late avant-garde movement in the USSR and the ideas of the Kinoks, which sought a direct, observational form of cinema. Filmed in Kyiv, then part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, it reflects a period of rapid social and industrial transformation, where everyday life, nature, and modern technology are shown in continuous interaction. Through the passage from winter to spring, Kaufman constructs a lyrical yet analytical vision of a society in transition, capturing the rhythms of urban and natural renewal while experimenting with a cinematic language that rejects narrative in favor of perception and movement.
