‘GROWING up in a small town in Ukraine, I didn’t know what to do. I always looked up into the sky for the stars and thought about what if somebody was up in space and our Earth exploded,” U Are The Universe writer-director Pavlo Ostrikov laughs.
“I don’t know why I thought about this idea! But it was really interesting to me just to discover what’s beyond this horizon, what’s beyond our Earth.”
Is that where he envisages the future to be like?
“I’m really afraid, I’m really scared it would end like that, that we just will be too foolish to understand that we live in a tiny rock in the middle of the universe and we need to save this place. We need to save our lives, our planet somehow. But now it’s so. .. it’s crazy times not only for Ukraine but for the whole world. We need to be brave.”
U Are The Universe is a futuristic drama about Andriy, a Ukrainian astronaut alone on his ship when the Earth explodes. Initially thinking he’s the last human left alive, he receives a call from French astronaut Catherine – and his mission becomes saving Catherine at all costs.
Though Ostrikov managed to film around 80% of the production before the war in Ukraine began, he ran into difficulties when his more complicated shots were scheduled for March 2022 – a month after Russia’s invasion.
“We paused the project for half a year but after that we realised that we need to finish it and that’s why we started to gather the crew. We can’t go abroad during the war, so we tried to find a really good location near Kyiv – my first approach was the beach, which is cliché, but I badly wanted a black beach maybe in Iceland, something like that but with our budget it was near Kyiv.
“But it’s really weird the whole place, it’s like mountains. We were happy to have found this place. It’s really metaphoric and it looks like his and my native region, Khmelnytskyi.
“After the invasion, we invited the actress who plays Catherine to Kyiv but during this time, Russia launched the first massive attack to the energy facilities, and she refused to go to Kyiv and we understood it completely.
“It has some scars, this project, and now I like it because it’s not perfect.”
Ostrikov also ran into self-imposed limits – as the majority of the film only takes place in Andriy’s spaceship.
“Though I really prefer shooting with long shots, it’s my style, I couldn’t do it in this place because we needed to shoot the whole movie in just the four rooms so I needed to somehow change my stylistic approach for this material. So I had to make more cuts than I prefer.
“It was a challenge also for the whole crew to build the set but I realise that it was the only plan to do sci-fi in Ukraine. Because you can’t do a big sci-fi in Ukraine. Maybe it’s the first Ukrainian sci-fi? I don’t know if it’s true or not but we didn’t know how to do sci-fi, we just tried. That’s why I limited myself to this one actor and one spaceship.”
Though hitting on some heavy topics and with a bleakness that carries through the film, Ostrikov balances the loneliness with light comedy – including a particularly silly musical beat.
“It was more comedy in the first draft of the script I wrote in 2015,” he explains. “It still had this bitter ending of course with many stupid jokes but I was younger and after some tough years, I became more … I guess more of a sad person, more melancholic, so that’s why I tried to change the story also more to myself, to my soul and it became more dramedy in the end with some jokes.
“I like the mix of drama and comedy because it reminds me of life – like even now in Ukraine during the war, we can laugh or tell jokes. It’s okay because it’s our life, it’s not black and white. I like the transformation of the expecting audience because when you see the first act it’s like a pure comedy with stupid jokes, but the third act is like a pure drama. I like how we approached this, the process of the melding genres.”
Though the film shares a lot of similarities with the invasion of his home country, with Andriy dodging debris and watching his whole world turn to rubble, Ostrikov surprises me with the fact that it was all coincidence: “It was a long process to make this film so it’s not about the invasion, about the war, because we shot almost 80% of the film before the invasion. So, it has some similarities with this recent tragedy but my basic idea was to show loneliness in the most lonely place in our universe – space.
“I feel lonely sometimes. It’s emotions so deep, so basic for all humanity so I needed somehow to share this film with other people, this is why I tried to connect with this film and tried to show that we need to find each other in this mad world.”
And if there’s anything Ostrikov wants people to take away from the film, it’s the simple message of human connection.
“If you feel alone, just know that there’s somebody who’s waiting for you, who needs you, you just need to take the first step. Don’t be alone, it’s a disaster, you need to find somebody. And he or she is here, you just need to see, to take that first step. I believe in it.
“But also, we in Ukraine don’t want to be alone in this universe. So don’t forget about us. Not only you but your people. We’re just in the middle of negotiations except we can’t be a part of them and it’s so bad and it’s depressed all Ukrainians of what will be and what will our future be so if we gather, if we get together, maybe it could have some happy ending.”
U Are The Universe will play during Glasgow Film Festival on March 4 and 5
