My name is Tetiana Kalivoshko. I am a Ukrainian-born multimedia artist and co-director of Cultural
Drifts, a Los Angeles-based art collective. I left Ukraine in 2014. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in
February 2022, I have returned several times to see family, to witness the horror of almost a decade
of war, and to try to understand what is happening to the artists I grew up among.
Each time I have returned, I have had the same conversations: not only about how the devastation
wrought by the war has affected every aspect of life (which can be seen and felt everywhere) but
about what has happened to the creative life of artists and the larger cultural dialogue that gives
meaning to any society. A choreographer tells me her movement vocabulary has narrowed. A
painter says he cannot use certain colors anymore without feeling something close to shame. A
writer says she stopped writing in Russian, the language she first published in, and is now rebuilding
her voice in Ukrainian from the ground up. These are not incidental shifts. They are structural
transformations in how artists think, perceive, and make. And these subtle changes will lay the
foundations for whatever the contours of Ukrainian culture will be after the war.
Through my partnership with the Los Angeles collective Cultural Drifts, I want to document these
transformations among the artistic community of Ukraine, changes I believe will be harbingers of a
post-war Ukrainian society.
There are many important documentaries about the war in Ukraine, among them 20 Days in
Mariupol (2023, Academy Award winner), Porcelain War (2024 Sundance Grand Jury Prize,
Oscar-nominated), Winter on Fire, A House Made of Splinters, and We Will Not Fade Away.
These films document destruction, resistance, and survival with extraordinary courage. They show
artists who have taken up arms, who perform in bomb shelters, who refuse to evacuate. They make
an essential argument: Russia’s goal is not only territorial but cultural, the eradication of Ukrainian
identity. But history has shown us that language and culture cannot be bombed like buildings. They
are the psychological and emotional ground that gives meaning to our lives.
This documentary asks a different question. Not what artists endure, but what the war has done to
what and how they practice their creativity. How has a dancer’s relationship to her own body
changed when that body has lived through sustained threat? How does a painter negotiate an
aesthetic tradition partly formed inside the culture of the aggressor? How does a filmmaker find form
when the documentary itself is under pressure to become testimony? These are questions about the
formal life of art under conditions of prolonged trauma, and no film has gone there yet.
What the film will do
We will interview choreographers, painters, writers, filmmakers, and curators, not about the events
of the war, but about what has changed in how they work. We will ask about palette, about rhythm,
about the relationship to language and tradition. We will speak with psychologists working with
artists and public figures navigating grief and cultural dislocation, and with influencers who have
found themselves becoming unexpected vessels for emotional processing in a society where direct
discussion of trauma carries stigma.
Through my collaboration with Cultural Drifts, which is co-developing this project, I have decided to
organize the documentary around the phenomenology of trauma: how it moves through the body
first, then alters perception, then reshapes language and relationship. This arc gives the film a
structural argument, that what is happening to Ukrainian artists is not a set of individual responses
but a collective transformation, a culture remaking its formal vocabulary under fire. This argument
speaks beyond Ukraine. Anyone who has faced conditions they could not change, displacement,
loss, the collapse of a familiar world, will recognize what these artists are navigating.