Marysia Nikitiuk

Director / Screenwriter · Fiction Feature


My motivation for my project “Cherry Blossom“

With the beginning of the war, this idea lost its relevance, but the image of a
vulnerable teenage girl and a certain psychological portrait that I managed to create did not leave me. A month and a half after the beginning of the full-scale invasion, I spent in the village of Smyga in Rivne region, where about 100-150 displaced people, mostly women with children and teenagers, passed through our shelter. I had the opportunity to observe how children and teenagers perceive the war and what challenges they face. So after the first month of the war, when the biggest initial shock had passed, I returned to developing a story about a teenage girl and a adoult man, but from a completely different perspective. Of course, in addition to the artistic value, this work on the creation of the idea of a new scenario about trauma had a therapeutic value for me. This work allowed me to stabilize my psyche and return to my professional activities.

How do you plan to use the scholarship?

I will come back to Kyiv in the end of August 2022 and plan to finish script by the Spring of 2023. I plan to collaborate with psychological groups that works with children, who was forced to move from their houses because of war. This way I plan to help children and to make stronger the line of main character by observing children and teenagers during group art therapy, etc.
So I plan to continue my research for the script and to write and finish the script. For now I have 3-rd draft of treatment, I hope to have an upgrade treatment by the end of August. So I will continue to work with it on results of future researches, that can lead me to the best version of the script by the beginning of spring 2023.
The scholarship I plan to use for leaving (food, transport, taxes, communal payments, etc.), as I, as other filmmakers in Ukraine, have lost any possibility to get money for my professional work.

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Marysia Nikitiuk