Home is 1117 km away
Maria, who was forced to leave Ukraine, embarks on a quest for a neighbor in her rented apartment in Budapest. She extends a warm invitation for like-minded women to drop by, explore the flat, and engage in conversations. One by one, potential neighbors visit her. The discussions about food habits, cleanliness in the home, and bedtime routines transition into intimate conversations about what the feeling of home and loneliness means. And when Ukrainian girls visit Maria one after another, the search for a neighbor turns into a poignant exchange of details about the traumatic experience of war and forced displacement.
Marta Smerechynska (1997) is a Ukrainian documentary filmmaker. She holds academic degrees from I.K. Karpenko-Kary University in Kyiv, La Fémis in Paris, and the DocNomads Erasmus Master's program in Portugal, Hungary, and Belgium. Her films have been screened at over 30 festivals, including Visions du Réel, Sarajevo Film Festival, DMZ Docs, PÖFF Shorts, and FipaDoc. Marta's feature-length debut documentary focuses on reconnecting with her sister, who has become a nun, by exploring life in her new home—a remote women's monastery in the West of Ukraine. Recently, Marta has been focusing on portraying various facets of the Ukrainian wartime experience in her films.
