TIMESTAMP / STRICHKA CHASU (Ukraine-Luxemburg-Netherlands-France, 2025, 125′)

Thursday October 2nd, at 9 p.m., Cinema Massimo, Screen 3

National premiere

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International title: Timestamp
Original title: Strichka chasu
Director: Kateryna Gornostai
Screenplay: Kateryna Gornostai
Photography: Oleksandr Roshchyn
Editing: Nikon Romanchenko
Sound: Alexey Shmurak
Production: 2Brave Productions, Cinéphage Productions, Rinkel Film, a_BAHN

Keeping schools open in Ukraine is an attempt to regain at least a speck of the normal life that the population used to have before the war started on February 24th, 2022. Without the use of interviews, the film – shot between March 2023 and June 2024 in Central, North, South and East Ukraine – provides an overview of the way students and teachers’ everyday life has been influenced by the war. With a mosaic structure, an intimate perspective and never directly showing war, Timestamp explores how a school works, both in person and online, during a dramatic period both at the front line and far from it. Daily life and constant danger are intertwined; however, one must continue to teach and do it as a form of resistance.

Kateryna Gornostai (Lutsk, 1989) graduated in Biology and then switched paths to study Journalism in Kyiv. From 2012 to 2013 she attended the Marina Razbezhkina Documentary Film and Theatre School in Moscow, before going back to Kyiv to film the protests during Euromaidan and to start exploring fiction and hybrid forms of cinema. After some narrative short films and documentaries, in 2021 she debuted with the fiction work Stop-Zemlia . She lives and works in Kyiv, where she teaches Movie Direction.

Filmography: Mizh namy (sf, doc, 2013), Skriz Maidan (mlf, doc, 2015), Away (sf, 2015), Condensed (sf, 2016), Lilac (sf, 2017), Crocodile (sf, 2018), Stop-Zemlia (2021), Timestamp (doc, 2025).