
Directing
Nataliya Ilchuk
Known for
Directing
Credits
34 titles
Since 2006, Nataliya Ilchuk has been making short films, documentaries, and videos in which she explores the theme of individual identity and collective historical memory against the background of different social and cultural discourses. Her personal experience is based on the movement between Eastern and Western Europe, life in socialist and capitalist societies, but also the transition from analogue to digital media, the pre- and post-internet era. She perceives the movement between different political, social, and cultural paradigms as leading to the necessity to revise previous experiences and to seek a new orientation in a society that has no relation to the lived past. Ilchuk's works…
Known for
NRMaternité is a film about the fatigue of a mother of two small kids. The act of self-sacrifice for the sake of a child that absorbs all the time and leaves no space neither for consumption, nor for satisfactions or vanity, becomes a chance for a devoted woman in a state of the physical and emotional exhaustion to reach the transcendental state close to spiritual ecstasy. Lacking resources for a proper functioning, her organism starts disassociating information and enters into a seeming madness, when the brain is unable to control thought process as usual, and because of a total focus solely on a child, all the rest in the world ceases to be of any importance, freeing her from everything excessive and superfluous.
Maternity
2019
NR“Livemusic” is a video made in 2021 based on the archive filmed in Ukraine in 2007 in a polluted industrial town during the drum'n'bass concert. It is an audiovisual piece born from an attempt not to produce the new material but to rework, “recycle” the existing images and sound in order to re-use them with maximum economy of means, along with a minimum of waste, unlike the overproduction with which we are surrounded daily in all areas of life. "Livemusic" aims to imagine how the music of the future will sound, and what the world of the future will look like.
livemusic
2022
No synopsis available yet.
Intervilles
2020
NRExperimental animation created using the 1960s film archive. Story of one's life in short episodes. A car can also have a biography.
Autoportrait
2011
NRShort film about two shirts in love. The end of a relationship between two people doesn't mean the end of a relationship between their clothes.
Farewell
2011
NR"There's no work in Ukraine," said my father, appearing in my life when I was 18. He invited me to join him in the Czech Republic. His letters (2003–2007) about solitary life abroad embody a desire not to forget the period of transformation in Ukraine. The voice-over belongs to a person who doesn’t exist in reality, the better to correspond to a voice of a person who doesn’t exist in my life, but whose voice I hear when reading the letters addressed to someone who perhaps didn’t exist either.
Euroteleport
2025
Behind the camera
NRMaternité is a film about the fatigue of a mother of two small kids. The act of self-sacrifice for the sake of a child that absorbs all the time and leaves no space neither for consumption, nor for satisfactions or vanity, becomes a chance for a devoted woman in a state of the physical and emotional exhaustion to reach the transcendental state close to spiritual ecstasy. Lacking resources for a proper functioning, her organism starts disassociating information and enters into a seeming madness, when the brain is unable to control thought process as usual, and because of a total focus solely on a child, all the rest in the world ceases to be of any importance, freeing her from everything excessive and superfluous.
Maternity
2019
NRMaternité is a film about the fatigue of a mother of two small kids. The act of self-sacrifice for the sake of a child that absorbs all the time and leaves no space neither for consumption, nor for satisfactions or vanity, becomes a chance for a devoted woman in a state of the physical and emotional exhaustion to reach the transcendental state close to spiritual ecstasy. Lacking resources for a proper functioning, her organism starts disassociating information and enters into a seeming madness, when the brain is unable to control thought process as usual, and because of a total focus solely on a child, all the rest in the world ceases to be of any importance, freeing her from everything excessive and superfluous.
Maternity
2019
NR“Livemusic” is a video made in 2021 based on the archive filmed in Ukraine in 2007 in a polluted industrial town during the drum'n'bass concert. It is an audiovisual piece born from an attempt not to produce the new material but to rework, “recycle” the existing images and sound in order to re-use them with maximum economy of means, along with a minimum of waste, unlike the overproduction with which we are surrounded daily in all areas of life. "Livemusic" aims to imagine how the music of the future will sound, and what the world of the future will look like.
livemusic
2022
No synopsis available yet.
Intervilles
2020
NRExperimental animation created using the 1960s film archive. Story of one's life in short episodes. A car can also have a biography.
Autoportrait
2011
NRExperimental animation created using the 1960s film archive. Story of one's life in short episodes. A car can also have a biography.
Autoportrait
2011
NRShort film about two shirts in love. The end of a relationship between two people doesn't mean the end of a relationship between their clothes.
Farewell
2011
NRShort film about two shirts in love. The end of a relationship between two people doesn't mean the end of a relationship between their clothes.
Farewell
2011
NR"There's no work in Ukraine," said my father, appearing in my life when I was 18. He invited me to join him in the Czech Republic. His letters (2003–2007) about solitary life abroad embody a desire not to forget the period of transformation in Ukraine. The voice-over belongs to a person who doesn’t exist in reality, the better to correspond to a voice of a person who doesn’t exist in my life, but whose voice I hear when reading the letters addressed to someone who perhaps didn’t exist either.
Euroteleport
2025
One day in the life of the Sykhiv district.
Psychoville
2004
NRA documentary about time.
Transience
2007
NRA documentary about time.
Transience
2007
NRCities in transformation: architecture, subway plans, telephone lines, tracks, squares, crossed by shadows. Two lovers attempt to reach each others through walls. Lines of poetry written on naked bodies. Post-rock. Highway lights in the dark.
bodiless lovers
2009
NRCities in transformation: architecture, subway plans, telephone lines, tracks, squares, crossed by shadows. Two lovers attempt to reach each others through walls. Lines of poetry written on naked bodies. Post-rock. Highway lights in the dark.
bodiless lovers
2009
NRSearching for the real in the world of the virtual, motivated by an urge to exteriorize the feeling of loss and grief. 3D reconstruction of the kitchen of the film author's grandparents, where they had dinner together every Sunday and talked about death.
kitchen.blend
2021
NRSearching for the real in the world of the virtual, motivated by an urge to exteriorize the feeling of loss and grief. 3D reconstruction of the kitchen of the film author's grandparents, where they had dinner together every Sunday and talked about death.
kitchen.blend
2021
NRThe film is about the constraints faced by two women who are unable to release their repressed essence. Overcoming the uneasiness of communicating with a reserved and self-controlled woman, the main heroine is eager to share the intimate experience with her, ultimately coming to terms with one’s identity.
Clubbing
2024
NRThe film is about the constraints faced by two women who are unable to release their repressed essence. Overcoming the uneasiness of communicating with a reserved and self-controlled woman, the main heroine is eager to share the intimate experience with her, ultimately coming to terms with one’s identity.
Clubbing
2024
NRIn a painful conversation, fifty-year-old Lilia speaks of her mental trauma as a result of her parents’ constant disputes during her childhood, while her mother justifies the lack of love by the strict frames of a totalitarian society.
Sensitive Material
2021
NRIn a painful conversation, fifty-year-old Lilia speaks of her mental trauma as a result of her parents’ constant disputes during her childhood, while her mother justifies the lack of love by the strict frames of a totalitarian society.
Sensitive Material
2021
NRUnplanned concert of an unexisting band at the unfound club.
At the Barvy club in Kyiv
2006
NRDocumentary about artist Mykhailo Dzyndra and his Museum of Modern Sculpture.
alone in struggle
2008
NRDocumentary about artist Mykhailo Dzyndra and his Museum of Modern Sculpture.
alone in struggle
2008
NRBased on miniDV archive shot in 2006 in a Ukrainian city of Lviv during the celebration of 750 years since its founding. The film speaks of herd instinct, mass behavior and crowd control and is constructed as a multi-screen centered on the idea of surveillance cameras, movement tracking and facial recognition of people who are gathering in places of historical memory urged by a need for entertainment, wanting to be among strangers and following them with no particular goal. A project about loss of liberty in the times when people are treated as objects for machine learning: everyone is a target and everything is recorded. It questions the possibility of perception of other humans as mysterious and unpredictable beings without calculating their emotions algorithmically but following senses and intuition.
750
2021
Processes inside the human body begin to exist not inside the organism but outside, on the surface of parts of the body.
Green Witch 2
2009
NRDocumentary concert film featuring 7 Ukrainian gothic bands based on the archival footage from 2005 rediscovered and edited in 2026.
Gothic is Serenity
2026
NRThe film depicts rather carefree times in Ukraine and is set in 2005-2006, when people still enjoyed questionnaires and home parties instead of social networks, played in bands instead of founding startups, embraced their youth instead of going through horrors of war. That period of Ukraine’s history has not been represented much on screen and the resurrection of videos that documented life as it is with no staging shows human nature authentically barefaced.
Questionnaire
2022
NRA night ride on the Bohdanivska street in Lviv.
Signs
2020
NRA night ride on the Bohdanivska street in Lviv.
Signs
2020
No synopsis available yet.
Smile of a Tear
2014
NRA film and a 3-screen installation about a woman who manages to maintain her integrity by avoiding the paradigms imposed by the social conditions of existence, focusing instead on the world beyond material dimension with its many limitations. Continual ritual gestures that do not involve obtaining a profit and an irrational faith in an unattainable have become the main basis of the film in which the prosaic reality is not expressed explicitly but through the visual poetry of a town in decay.
The Seventh Shift
2023
NRA film and a 3-screen installation about a woman who manages to maintain her integrity by avoiding the paradigms imposed by the social conditions of existence, focusing instead on the world beyond material dimension with its many limitations. Continual ritual gestures that do not involve obtaining a profit and an irrational faith in an unattainable have become the main basis of the film in which the prosaic reality is not expressed explicitly but through the visual poetry of a town in decay.
The Seventh Shift
2023
NRA film and a 3-screen installation about a woman who manages to maintain her integrity by avoiding the paradigms imposed by the social conditions of existence, focusing instead on the world beyond material dimension with its many limitations. Continual ritual gestures that do not involve obtaining a profit and an irrational faith in an unattainable have become the main basis of the film in which the prosaic reality is not expressed explicitly but through the visual poetry of a town in decay.
The Seventh Shift
2023
NRVideo chronicle of a dinner at the iconic Intervilles café in the French town Roubaix, where Béla Tarr is hanging out together with his students from Le Fresnoy during preparation of the bottarga pasta. Filmed in February 2019 and edited in 2026 specifically for screening at the tribute programme to Béla Tarr, this video contains a seemingly offhand remark which, however, aptly sums up seven years of transformation in our perception of reality and the way we create images and maintain relationships, influenced by the prevalence of vertical videos on social media.
First Lesson
2026
