“The Maribor Uprisings” is an experimental interactive documentary by Maple Razsa and Milton Guillén. It consists of 12 short films – 5 Ukrainian and 7 foreign, including “Junker” by Mikhail Gorobchuk, who won an award at Artdocheste-2017 for best documentary. The main competition of the festival, the “Palm of the North”, is for the first time international this year. Your guide in this wild territory will be Fela Kuti, one of the continent’s greatest musicians and political activists. Olsson will also introduce and comment on the films that influenced his vision as a director: Barbara Kopple’s “Harlan County, USA” and Andy Warhol’s “Chelsea Girls”. It is surely a significant achievement for “86” that Olsson will travel to Slavutych to present his film and his retrospective. The subject of Olsson’s work has always been the African continent and people. The project is organized by Göran Hugo Olsson - a leading documentary director in Sweden. The “Fonko” project is an opportunity to travel through the African continent to discover unknown treasures – modern African music made with the help of computers and new technologies, which combine American and European tools and patterns with a local spirit. Here is our selection of the most promising festival events. The curators of this Urbanist festival lovingly hand-picked special content for this year’s festival, which has the radical potential to take you out of your mundane reality and to give your mind a good shake. It is about what’s hidden and perhaps the most important trope of all: love at first sight”. The festival founders claim is that the essence of the festival “is those things that resist being captured and described. The festival program combines documentary films, events dedicated to urbanism and contemporary music in accordance with the year’s primary theme - “Something in the air”.

The location of the festival is perhaps the most interesting thing about it- the event is yearly in Slavutych- the youngest city in the country, which was built specifically to house the workers evacuated from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the wake of the disastrous meltdown. On May 9th, the “86” Festival of Film and Urbanism is slated to begin, opening for the fifth year in a row one of the most innovative independent events in the contemporary Ukrainian arts calender. To learn more about Chernihiv, read our special guide to the region. What to do and see at the innovative 86 Festival of Film and Urbanism in the northern Ukrainian region of Chernihiv.

Something in the air guide