“La Palisiada” chosen to represent Ukraine at the Oscars

The Ukrainian Oscar Committee, which met on September 9th, 2024, has chosen Philip Sotnychenko’s feature La Palisiada to represent Ukraine at the 2025 Oscars. Philip Sotnychenko has received ESFUF development support for his latest project, Times New Roman.

Set in Ukraine in 1996, 5 months before the moratorium on death penalty, La Palisiada follows two old friends, a police detective and a forensic psychiatrist, investigating a murder of their colleague. Co-produced by companies Contemporary Ukrainian Cinema and Viatel, the film is Sotnychenko’s first feature-length film. The film had its world premiere at Rotterdam IFF in 2023, where it was awarded the FIPRESCI prize.

Philip Sotnychenko and his producer, Valeria Sochyvets, discussed the film production, which lasted for 5 years, in an interview with Suspilne Kultura. He explained the team’s process for recreating the 1990s on screen: “To convey the atmosphere, we studied various videos and photos from that period, which we found on the Internet and in our own personal archives. We also studied operational videos of police work in the mid-1990s.”

The film’s producer, Valeria Sochyvets,  acknowledges the work of the whole team, and states: “We’ve become very close with director of photography Volodymyr Usyk: this is the first film we’ve made together. And the camera in this film is a very important separate tool for this story. I’m still very proud of the work of producer Margarita Kulyk (we’ve already worked together on short films) and of Volodymyr Kuznetsov’s costume design. It seems to me that it made it possible to convey the life of the 90s.”

Regarding the casting of actors, Sotnychenko explains they were “looking for performers for the roles in the film, both among professional actors and among those we found in the town of Oujhorod.” Among the professional actors of the main cast is Novruz Hikmet, who is also working, as a director, on the fiction project “Hardsub“, which received ESFUF development support in December 2023.