Ukrainian Cinema & Expat Storytellers

Presented by SEEfest Borderlands/Nowhere Dialogues

Monday, January 22, 2024 @ 3 pm
UCLA Bridges Theatre 

Prolific producer Polina Herman, a recent transplant from Ukraine, is joined by fellow expat filmmakers to share perspectives on creating stories both personal and American.

The event is hosted by the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media and will take place in-person in James Bridges Theater on January 22, 2024 at 3:00 PM.

RSVP is highly recommended.

Polina Herman is an LA-based Ukrainian producer and the founder of UP UA Studio, which she established in 2016. Following a degree in marketing & advertising, she completed film studies at the Kyiv University, and in 2023 took a producing course at UCLA Film School. In her native Ukraine she worked as PR director and festival producer, transitioning to film production with several documentaries, shorts and music videos to her name. Her film, The Price of Conflict participated in the 38th IDA Documentary Awards earning the ABC News VideoSource nomination, and documentary King Lear: How We Looked for Love During the War premiered at SEEfest in 2023. 

In 2022, Polina Herman came to Los Angeles as a war refugee. She soon organized Days of Ukrainian Cinema with the support of the American Cinematheque, and joined SEEfest, the South East European Film Festival, as a resident producer. She is a member of the Ukrainian Cinema Academy, Film Independent, and International Documentary Association, and together with Vlad Klimchuk established the Dovzhenko League to promote Ukrainian cinema in the U.S. 

IMDb 

Vlad Kimchuk is Los Angeles-based Ukrainian film director and writer working in commercials and movies. He started as a standup comedian and later debuted as a showrunner on a teenage series, then began directing movies and commercials. He is now the highest-grossing Ukrainian film director. Three out of his four feature films are streaming on regional Netflix.

His feature films Crazy Wedding (2018) and Crazy Wedding 2 (2020) were the number-one Ukrainian films of the year. Having started as a writer, he became the showrunner of How The Style Was Tempered, then mastered directing popular comedies. He also dabbles in other genres: independent shorts, particularly story-driven films mixing action and thriller elements. After the spectacular success of his second feature film, he moved to the US where he obtained an MFA in Filmmaking, and took part in the Fulbright Graduate Student Program. Having over ten years of experience in the film industry, Vlad is a member of the European Film Academy, has several features under his belt, and for the last four years has worked in collaboration with FILM.UA, the largest film studio in Eastern Europe.

About The Best Weekend, he says: ‘It is my love letter to Kyiv. I wanted to show local people and youngsters from different regions of Ukraine coming together in the capital. The movie is not a drama where everything is grey as in the news about the war. The pace is fast, and the film shows Kyiv in a bright, sunny, lovely way – the way it was before 2022.”

View on IMDb

Toni Bell is a documentary consultant, archival researcher, and impact producer for films like The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales and Fruits of Labor. She’s been a mentor and industry representative at Berlinale, Doc Society’s Good Pitch Local, Hot Docs, Sheffield, Korea Communications Agency, Big Sky, and more.

She’s the former Filmmaker Services Manager at the IDA, overseeing the fiscal sponsorship program.

She’s the creator/host of the u0022What’s Up with Docsu0022 Podcast and holds an M.A. in Visual Anthropology from USC, M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Naropa University, and a certificate in professional screenwriting from UCLA.

Moderator