LGBTQ+ DOCUMENTARY, 80 min.

DIRECTOR: Yuriy Dvizhon

SCREENWRITERS: Anastasiia Alieksieieva, Ljosha Chashchyn

PRODUCERS: Olesya Lukyanenko, Laura Bouwmeester

Two charismatic middle-aged couples – one gay and one lesbian – parallelly decide to defy marriage inequality in former USSR by tying the knot in Europe. Challenged by marginalization, family issues, border-crossing bureaucracy in Kazakhstan and Ukraine, they are serious about reaching their goal, yet find ultimate escape in their own eccentricities.

https://vimeo.com/966173672

TREATMENT

A TikTok post – one of those where the variety of fonts makes it difficult to read the caption – features a woman making a selfie video to the tune of a Kazakh language love song. Bako posts these videos every day: to be visible, to be present, including – in the life of her beloved one Larysa, who watches these videos in between texts and video calls with Bako. The two women met online and fell in love immediately. After a year of virtual romance they managed to make their dream come true and meet in real life, only to get dramatically divided from each other. Bako had to return back to her small town in Kazakhstan…

Volodymyr also watches his lover on TikTok: eccentric and elegant Petro stays at their home in Lviv. Here, in addition to Petro himself, there is also their cat, their plants, Volodymyr’s paintings. The man has not seen all this for more than two years. From the moment he went to Poland. Should he get jealous when Petro is out of reach? What if his videos will attract some other followers? Will it challenge their love, their plans of retiring together, their dream of a wedding in the Netherlands? Petro’s circle is finally on again around the video icon. It seems that there is nothing to fear. Yet…

How did our protagonists end up here and what will they do next? It is a sweet and heartbreaking story full of twists and turns. A story that proves that marriage equality is not given, it is taken.

New Year’s Eve 2024. Larysa is in a hurry: she needs to clean-up the shelter for internally displaced persons where she lives, feed her sons (there are four of them), dress up and make up a little bit, buy flowers and go meet her sweetheart Bako at the train station. It is the first time that Larysa and Bako are meeting in person, but they have known each other for more than a year now, and they have been in love for more than a year.

But first let’s meet Bako at her home – in Kazakhstan, in a small conservative town. She is going to leave this place forever. She comes up with different versions for her neighbors, her colleagues and her acquaintances as to where and why she is leaving. Because to simply say that she is going to her beloved woman in Ukraine means putting herself in danger here. On the train, which Bako barely makes it to, she finally feels freer. She can talk about her life: the self-rejection, the unreflective attraction to girls, the gang rape during her student years, the unhappy marriage, the coming out, and then – meeting Larysa and making her way to her. One only thing Bako is worried about is her student daughters, who are staying in Kazakhstan. They are the only people who know and support her.

Bako on her way to Ukraine, Kazakhstan, November, 2023

Bako comes across as naïve, overly cheerful, but she is a person who has revealed her identity to her hyper-conservative family and withstood the pressure. A lesbian in a Muslim post-Soviet environment who survived. And she leaves her whole life for her beloved one. Who she had never seen in real life, whom she had never touched.

Larysa also seems naïve, because despite having lived with her abusive husband, despite one of her sons’ severe disability, despite the betrayal of her former lover and despite the need to flee from her war-torn hometown, she still believes in love and repeats that "everything will be all right".

Larysa and Bako's first meeting, Lviv, November, 2023

The meeting of Larysa and Bako at the train station in Lviv is tender and romantic. As are their first days together. Exploring sensations and bodies. From Kazakhstan, Bako brought a ring for Larysa – to immediately get engaged with her. And also – a huge plastic bucket of instant coffee, the one that Larysa’s sons like, and which is not sold at the shops in Lviv. Larysa and Bako compare the identical tattoos each of them got at a distance. They somewhat don’t match in scale, however. Bako’s ones are bigger.

But they have a lot of serious planning ahead too: where and how to go next, or whether it is possible to stay, how to look for a job, how to register in Ukraine? Equal marriages are not allowed here, so Bako cannot get a residence permit simply by marrying her beloved one. Also, here people expect the shellings every day, and these shellings do happen, and people do die during them…