Mykhailo Masloboyshchykov
Director · Fiction Feature
My motivation for my project “The City“
My motivation to make this project is to see the result of my work for the past two years. I want to complete the script, to have an up-to-date visualisation of the project, and a possible protagonist. Some specific result I can lay my hand on and say “I trust this” and “let’s get ready to shoot”. […]
For a young veteran, who lost his home in the Edem fields of Ukrainian South, the only possible future now is the city — a melting pot of ideas, personalities, opportunities and passions. Kyiv, the destination for every dreamer and displaced person in the country. The tension between nostalgia for nature, and the acceptance of the need of live apart from it, is the source of toxicity in the urban society, which inevitably spreads into new human nature. These are the ideas which deeply motivate me to tell this story. While my Grandmother was alive, every year of my life I went to spend summer in the village near the Azov Sea, in Zaporizhska oblast. It was my second home, and now more than ever I have the nostalgia to one day come back into the wild fields of steppe. Where can you feel it more, than in the city?
How do you plan to use the scholarship?
My goal is to update the script, write the final draft. In order to do that your grant can help me not be confined only to my writing table. With the help of the grant:
- I will be able to make research on location (the church, dog kennel, city suburbs destroyed by war, a field near the sea)
- The grant will allow me to quit my hack job for a couple of months and devote my full time to the new version of the script
- Find a documentary character (young actor or non-actor with military experience, preferably from temporarily occupied Southern Ukraine (Zaporizhska or Khersonska oblast) as a prototype for the protagonist, who’s personality will be an additional realism source during writing and hopefully a future cast member
- Make a creative pre-visualization of one of the scenes from the movie (a photofilm or short video) to determine the visuals style, the sound and the atmosphere of the narrative. This kind of work will get the project ready for quick resume of production in case the war is over and government financing gets unfrozen or participation in international film markets and WIP sessions in the meanwhile.