The Best Ukrainian Films of 2025 Worth Watching
Ukrainian cinema in 2025 continues to speak about the war without generalizations or distance — through personal stories, intimate settings, and a close, attentive look at the individual. It is a year of festival premieres, powerful documentaries, and films that go beyond a purely local context. We have collected the best Ukrainian films of 2025 that are worth seeing.
«You Are the Cosmos»
The romantic science fiction drama «You Are the Cosmos» became one of the most notable Ukrainian films of the year and immediately made itself known internationally: its world premiere took place in the official competition of the Toronto International Film Festival. For Ukrainian cinema, this is an important marker — the feature-length debut of Pavlo Ostrikov not only reached the major festival stage but was also noticed there.
At the center of the story is Ukrainian astronaut Andrii Melnyk, a space trucker who transports nuclear waste to a moon of Jupiter. After the explosion of Earth, he believes himself to be the last human in the universe. Everything changes when a Frenchwoman named Catherine contacts him from a distant station near Saturn. Between two lonely voices, separated by cosmic distances and time delays, a sense of closeness gradually emerges.
Ostrikov builds the film in a highly intimate way: almost all events unfold inside the cargo ship «Horizon», and the story rests on a single actor, the voice of a robot, and a dialogue delayed in time. Volodymyr Kravchuk practically never leaves the screen — without pathos, with a precisely calibrated tone balanced between irony, fatigue, and hope.
Critics have repeatedly called «You Are the Cosmos» the first romantic tragicomedy of the full-scale war — not by genre formula, but by feeling. It is a film about loneliness, fear, and the habit of going on living even when the world has already exploded. About people who continue to joke, listen to music, celebrate birthdays, and fall in love — despite everything.
The music deserves special attention: Ukrainian songs by Nazarii Yaremchuk and Liubov Chaikovska function as an emotional anchor, keeping the hero connected to a lost home. The technical side — from studio sets to special effects — looks convincing even with a limited budget.
«You Are the Cosmos» was released in Ukrainian cinemas in November 2025 and became a rare example of Ukrainian science fiction that speaks not about technology but about a person — vulnerable, alive, and deeply human, even if drifting somewhere between Jupiter and Saturn.
«Honeymoon»
The debut feature by Zhanna Ozirna, «Honeymoon», is an intimate drama that captures perhaps the worst month in the history of independent Ukraine without generalizations or pathos, coming as close as possible to the bodily experience of life under occupation.
Newlyweds Taras and Olia move into a new apartment in the suburbs of Kyiv. On February 23, 2022, they celebrate their housewarming with friends — joking, drinking beer, talking about art, and discussing the possibility of a full-scale war more as an abstraction than a real threat. At dawn, they are awakened by explosions. The city is quickly occupied by Russian troops, and a headquarters is set up in their building. The couple fails to evacuate and finds themselves trapped in their own apartment — without electricity, water, or mobile communication.
Genre-wise, the film is described as a «romantic thriller»; however, the only romance here is the relationship itself. Taras (Roman Lutskyi) and Olia (Iryna Nirsha) live for five days in a regime of silence: speaking in whispers, moving crouched down, avoiding the large uncovered window behind which occupiers constantly roam. They hear shelling, raids, screams — and sound becomes the key dramaturgical tool of the film.
Through the aural space, Ozirna builds tension and depicts violence without resorting to direct images: regular shelling of Kyiv, the murder of a neighbor, the rape of a woman in the adjacent apartment. This technique works — and at the same time inevitably raises questions about the limits and appropriateness of such cinema during a full-scale war.
«Honeymoon» premiered in the Biennale College Cinema section at the 81st Venice Film Festival in September 2024. Since then, the film has been screened in 15 countries. It won the Grand Prix of the Molodist Kyiv International Film Festival, the Grand Prix of the Sofia International Film Festival, and the Jury Prize «Golden Atlas» at the Arras Film Festival.
«Second Breath»
The documentary film «Second Breath» tells the story of five Ukrainian veterans who, after severe injuries on the front line, decide to do what until recently seemed impossible: climb Mount Kilimanjaro.
Olha «Vysota» Yehorova, Roman «Dobriak» Kolesnyk, Vladyslav «Shati» Shatilo, Mykhailo «Grizzly» Matviiv, and Oleksandr «Ragnar» Mikhov are soldiers with lower-limb amputations. Together they ascend the highest point in Africa — 5,895 meters above sea level — and unfurl the Ukrainian flag at the summit.
However, the film is not reduced to a chronicle of an extreme ascent. «Second Breath» captures the inner journey of its heroes: life before the war and after the injuries, preparation for the expedition, physical pain, doubts, mutual support, and the gradual rethinking of their own experiences. It is a film about team spirit and life after trauma — without heroization, but with a palpable sense of human dignity.
The director of the film is Mariia Kondakova, a French-Ukrainian documentary filmmaker who has been working with the topic of war in Ukraine since 2014. According to her, this film is not about «conquering a peak» but about people who challenge limitations and stereotypes — first and foremost their own.
The cinematographer was Serhii Mykhalchuk. The music was created by sound producer Yevhen Filatov (Maneken) and composer Oleksandr Chornyi. TV host Oleksandr Pedan also joined the project — as a participant in the ascent, an ambassador of the «Second Breath» foundation, and a co-producer of the film.
«Cuba & Alaska»
The documentary film «Cuba & Alaska» tells the story of two friends and sister-paramedics — Yuliia «Cuba» Sidorova and Oleksandra «Alaska» Lysytska — who save lives on the front line of the Russian-Ukrainian war.
The film looks at the war from a female perspective — without declarations or pathos. It shows that a woman in the military can be just as effective and resilient as a man, while still retaining emotionality and vulnerability. There is not only heroism here, but also everyday life: routine at positions, daily work, friendship, love, loss, pain, and laughter.
Director Yehor Troianovskyi builds the narrative around the relationship between the protagonists. Together they face the challenges of the front with humor and mutual support, but gradually encounter an experience familiar to many soldiers: the longer the service lasts, the further friends, family, and pre-war life recede. It is a story about how war changes people but does not destroy them.
The idea for the film emerged in the spring–summer of 2022. Producer Olha Brehman recalls that at the time she and the director were working in the Kharkiv region, assisting foreign journalists. They had known Cuba from a volunteer headquarters, and later learned that she was serving together with Alaska — both as paramedics. The first interview and videos the women shot themselves came together into a cohesive, living story.
«For us, this film has always been not about the war, but about life during the war,» Brehman emphasizes. About how, in the darkest moments, one can preserve inner light, continue to dream, remember the past, and look for support in the present.
«Antarctica»
After the success of his debut film «We, Our Pets and the War», travel blogger and director Anton Ptushkin returned with a new documentary — this time about the Ukrainian Antarctic station Akademik Vernadsky and the people who live and work there.
«Antarctica» is an observation of the everyday life of Ukrainian polar researchers: work in extreme conditions, daily routines at the edge of the world, climate research, and scientific experiments. On screen — long weather changes, isolation, the team’s internal discipline, and, of course, penguins, which here are not exotic but part of everyday life.
Ptushkin films without heroization, but with clear sympathy for his subjects. The film works not only as travel documentary, but also as a portrait of a community of people who consciously chose life far from civilization — for the sake of science and Ukraine’s presence in Antarctica.
The Ukrainian theatrical premiere of «Antarctica» took place on September 4, 2025 — and the film immediately became a box-office phenomenon. In the first days, it was seen by more than 200,000 viewers, and box office revenues reached around 30 million hryvnias. In two weeks, the film attracted more viewers than the three most popular Ukrainian documentary films of 2024 combined.
This is a rare example of documentary cinema that combines spectacle, educational value, and mass appeal — while at the same time telling a calm, attentive story about people who literally hold the Ukrainian flag at the edge of the planet.
«2000 Meters to Andriivka»
The new documentary film by Mstyslav Chernov «2000 Meters to Andriivka» has become another Ukrainian project reaching the highest international level. In August 2025, it became known that this film would represent Ukraine at the «Oscar 2026» awards in the category «Best International Feature Film». For Chernov, this is already the second such case: his previous work «20 Days in Mariupol» brought Ukraine its first-ever «Oscar» — in the category of Best Feature Documentary.
«2000 Meters to Andriivka» tells the story of a mission undertaken by a Ukrainian platoon — to cross a well-fortified two-kilometer stretch of forest in order to liberate a strategically important village from Russian forces. The camera moves alongside the soldiers: the farther they advance across the devastated land, the more clearly they realize that this war may have no quick end.
Filming began in September 2023, and work on the film lasted almost a year and a half. In addition to Chernov, the project involved photographer Oleksandr Babenko and producers Michelle Mizner and Rainy Aronson-Rath; Mizner also handled the editing. The music was composed by two-time Grammy Award winner Sam Slater, known for his work on «Chernobyl» and «Joker».
Like «20 Days in Mariupol», «2000 Meters to Andriivka» is part of a collaboration between Frontline and the Associated Press documenting Russia’s war against Ukraine. It is harsh, direct cinema with no distance between the event and the viewer — an observational film about a war in which every meter has a price, and the path forward is measured not in kilometers, but in human endurance.
«One Summer in Ukraine»
The documentary film «One Summer in Ukraine» tells the story of foreign volunteers of the International Legion of the Defence Intelligence of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine who came to fight for Ukraine and spent a summer here that changed them forever.
At the center of the story are several volunteers from the United States — legionnaires from California, Washington, Arizona, and New Hampshire. During their service, they become friends: training, fighting, joking together, discovering Ukrainian cuisine, and talking about the future — about who they want to be after victory. The camera captures not only combat missions on the hottest sections of the front, but also everyday life: fatigue, doubts, adaptation to a new country and a new war.
The film was made by the «Babylon’13» film collective. The author of the idea and lead director was Volodymyr Tykhyi; Anastasiia Tykha and Hanna Tykha also served as directors. The film combines frontline documentary footage with deeply personal moments — conversations about fear, responsibility, and the reasons why people from another continent choose to fight for Ukraine’s freedom.
According to the creators, this is a film not so much about war as about life during war — about how not everyone can withstand the intense pace of training and service, how months of hot summer become a test for body and mind, and how true brotherhood is born under these conditions.
If after this selection you feel like not only watching films, but also seeking inspiration offline, take a look at our roundup «6 Places for Inspiration: Museums and Galleries of Kyiv Worth Visiting on the Weekend». It is about spaces where contemporary art, history, and living culture help you see Kyiv differently — more slowly, more attentively, and more deeply. An ideal route to continue the conversation that Ukrainian cinema begins.
