Olga + Q&A

A young female gymnast from Ukraine (Anastasiia Budiashkina) travels to Switzerland, where her estranged father lives, to try out for the Swiss team. She clashes with her prospective team-mates and is pressured to take up Swiss nationality. Meanwhile, the 2014 Euromaidan protests break out at home, and her friends and family become deeply involved. This is a film about a woman trying to find identity through sport, friends, family, sexuality and nationality while struggling with all of them. The gymnastics are beautifully shot, the largely non-professional cast (high-level athletes in real life) are tremendous and the director has artfully incorporated a lot of eye-opening amateur footage of the events that kicked off Ukraine’s deadly power-struggle with Russia.

Ukrainian/French with sub-titles