{"id":536310,"date":"2026-06-15T13:19:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T13:19:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/536310\/"},"modified":"2026-06-15T13:19:13","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T13:19:13","slug":"flow-producer-joins-philip-sotnychenkos-times-new-roman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/536310\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Flow’ Producer Joins Philip Sotnychenko’s ‘Times New Roman’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAcademy Award-winning\u00a0Latvian producer\u00a0Matiss Kaza<\/a>, who co-wrote and produced Gints\u00a0Zilbalodis\u2019 best animated feature winner \u201cFlow<\/a>,\u201d has boarded Ukrainian director Philip Sotnychenko<\/a>\u2019s sophomore film \u201cTimes New Roman,\u201d which will take part in the Transilvania Pitch Stop co-production forum this week at the Transilvania Film Festival<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tKaza\u2019s\u00a0Trickster Pictures joins the pan-European co-production, which is lead produced by Ukraine\u2019s Halyna Kryvorchuk of Viatel and Valeria Sochyvets and Sashko Chubko for Contemporary Ukrainian Cinema. Other co-production partners include Klementina Remeikaite and\u00a0Laurynas Bareisa for afterschool (Lithuania), Hans Broich for Superzoom Film (Germany) and\u00a0Ineke\u00a0Smits for GoGoFilm (Netherlands).<\/p>\n

\n\tSet in the aftermath of Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, \u201cTimes New Roman\u201d follows the Kyiv-based artist Roman, a man in the throes of a midlife crisis who battles an alcohol addiction while wrestling with the emotional strain of the war. An unlikely way out arrives when Roman is offered an ambitious performance art project: a trio of reenactments of historical assassinations of Ukrainian political figures exiled in Europe, an artistic statement intended to remind the world of the long and brutal history of Russian meddling in Ukrainian affairs. Lured by a chance to flee Ukraine, Roman sets out on a trip across Europe, where he\u2019ll soon discover that it\u2019s not so easy to leave his demons behind.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a director\u2019s statement provided exclusively to\u00a0Variety, Sotnychenko said his latest film \u201creflects my own experience of trying to remain an artist during war in a country with closed borders but open hearts.\u201d He described it as \u201ca narrative feature project that blends a personal story, an artistic gesture and political research.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201c\u2018Times New Roman\u2019\u00a0is a reflection on contemporary Ukraine, seen through the eyes of an artist in inner conflict \u2014 torn between staying or leaving, being useful or being honest, feeling or acting,\u201d said the director. \u201cThese are questions faced by many Ukrainians today, and I want to explore them through the language of cinema.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film is based on the political assassinations of three key Ukrainian independence movement leaders, who were killed by Soviet agents while in exile in Europe: Symon Petlura, who was shot dead in Paris in 1926; Yevhen Konovalets, killed with a bomb in 1938 in Rotterdam; and Stepan Bandera, who was poisoned in Munich in 1959. In the film, Roman embarks on a road trip to the three fateful sites to stage reenactments of the killings in front of the unsuspecting public. \u201cTimes New Roman\u201d will be made in collaboration with the performers and visual artists Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei, who will also star.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAs Sotnychenko explains, \u201cThe project explores how the personal experience of a modern Ukrainian intertwines with historical events, and how war, even when not directly shown, shapes intellectual, emotional and artistic life. This is a fragment of Roman\u2019s life \u2014 a man navigating new times and trying to find his place between duty and freedom, home and escape, the personal and the political.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSotnychenko\u2019s feature debut, \u201cLa Palisiada,\u201d was an enigmatic police procedural that centered on a pivotal moment in the recent history of Ukraine. Describing it as a \u201cdisquieting provocation,\u201d\u00a0Variety\u2019s Manuel Betancourt<\/a> <\/a>noted: \u201cThere\u2019s an elliptical, almost dream-like logic to how Sotnychenko crafts the film, which is disorienting to the point where you start to wonder if there is anything solid in what we\u2019re observing. All is nebulous and oblique, but within that haze is a powerful story about how history is written and the generational reverberations that such history cannot avoid.\u201d The film, which premiered at Rotterdam, was Ukraine\u2019s entry in the best international film Oscar race in 2023.<\/p>\n

\n\tFollowing the success of that film, which was entirely shot before Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2024,\u00a0\u201cTimes New Roman\u201d is being made in much more challenging circumstances.\u00a0\u201cEven though my debut film \u2018La Palisiada\u2019\u00a0was widely successful, the war in Ukraine makes it extremely difficult to develop films that follow such unorthodox artistic processes and raise difficult social and political themes,\u201d said Sotnychenko.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere are physical challenges, mental challenges and financial challenges,\u201d said producer\u00a0Sashko Chubko, who is part of the Contemporary Ukrainian Cinema collective. \u201cIt all creates this building mental stress and mental load on you. Most of us are quite exhausted right now, after four years of war. It\u2019s very difficult to work, but somehow, we still manage.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe production of \u201cTimes New Roman,\u201d however, has been bolstered by the news that\u00a0the Ukrainian State Film Agency is expected later this year to announce the results of its first funding call since the full-scale Russian invasion, which prompted the government to redirect cultural funding toward the war effort. That will give local producers a much-needed boost for international co-productions, with Chubko noting, \u201cFinally we can bring something to the table from the Ukrainian side.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Transilvania Intl. Film Festival runs June 12 \u2013 21.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Academy Award-winning\u00a0Latvian producer\u00a0Matiss Kaza, who co-wrote and produced Gints\u00a0Zilbalodis\u2019 best animated feature winner \u201cFlow,\u201d has boarded Ukrainian director…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":536311,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[263],"tags":[18,117,60238,19,17,230544,327,230545,230546],"class_list":["post-536310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-flow","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-matiss-kaza","tag-movies","tag-philip-sotnychenko","tag-transilvania-film-festival"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=536310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536310\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/536311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=536310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=536310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=536310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}