Nataliya Ilchuk

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

Maternity poster
NR

Maternité 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

livemusic poster
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 artwork available
NR

No synopsis available yet.

Intervilles

2020

Autoportrait poster
NR

Experimental animation created using the 1960s film archive. Story of one's life in short episodes. A car can also have a biography.

Autoportrait

2011

Farewell poster
NR

Short 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

Euroteleport poster
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

Maternity poster
NR

Maternité 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

Maternity poster
NR

Maternité 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

livemusic poster
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 artwork available
NR

No synopsis available yet.

Intervilles

2020

Autoportrait poster
NR

Experimental animation created using the 1960s film archive. Story of one's life in short episodes. A car can also have a biography.

Autoportrait

2011

Autoportrait poster
NR

Experimental animation created using the 1960s film archive. Story of one's life in short episodes. A car can also have a biography.

Autoportrait

2011

Farewell poster
NR

Short 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

Farewell poster
NR

Short 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

Euroteleport poster
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

No artwork available
NR

One day in the life of the Sykhiv district.

Psychoville

2004

Transience poster
NR

A documentary about time.

Transience

2007

Transience poster
NR

A documentary about time.

Transience

2007

bodiless lovers poster
NR

Cities 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

bodiless lovers poster
NR

Cities 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

kitchen.blend poster
NR

Searching 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

kitchen.blend poster
NR

Searching 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

Clubbing poster
NR

The 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

Clubbing poster
NR

The 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

Sensitive Material poster
NR

In 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

Sensitive Material poster
NR

In 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

At the Barvy club in Kyiv poster
NR

Unplanned concert of an unexisting band at the unfound club.

At the Barvy club in Kyiv

2006

alone in struggle poster
NR

Documentary about artist Mykhailo Dzyndra and his Museum of Modern Sculpture.

alone in struggle

2008

alone in struggle poster
NR

Documentary about artist Mykhailo Dzyndra and his Museum of Modern Sculpture.

alone in struggle

2008

750 poster
NR

Based 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

No artwork available
NR

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

Gothic is Serenity poster
NR

Documentary concert film featuring 7 Ukrainian gothic bands based on the archival footage from 2005 rediscovered and edited in 2026.

Gothic is Serenity

2026

Questionnaire poster
NR

The 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

Signs poster
NR

A night ride on the Bohdanivska street in Lviv.

Signs

2020

Signs poster
NR

A night ride on the Bohdanivska street in Lviv.

Signs

2020

No artwork available
NR

No synopsis available yet.

Smile of a Tear

2014

The Seventh Shift poster
NR

A 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

The Seventh Shift poster
NR

A 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

The Seventh Shift poster
NR

A 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

First Lesson poster
NR

Video 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