Day in day out

This year independent Ukraine turns 30, and for the last 15 years I’ve been documenting its citizens’ everyday life throughout Ukraine trying to see how, and whether at all, they change, transform from being Soviet to European. Do all those political and economical changes in the life of their country actually alter their own identity, the way they live, look, behave in public, interact with each other? I film those endless manifestations of loneliness, intolerance and despair, looking for signs of a capacity in us to leave behind our long inhabited ignorance and cynicism and overcome that “shell mode” tradition created by decades of surviving poverty, corruption, authorities that neglect you, constant political turmoils and now war. These 10 pictures I picked from the hundreds shot through these years reflect “the Ukrainian way” to me. This is a never ending project in hope that in some years I’m going to see us Ukrainians as a free, tolerant, respecting people of Europe in my photographs.