Grey Bees

Little Starhorodivka, a village of three streets, lies in the no-man’s-land between loyalist and separatist forces in the Donbas region of Ukraine. Sergiich and Pashka are former miners, but the mine has long stopped working. They are the last two remaining inhabitants, for better or worse dependent on each other. Sergiich the beekeeper is Ukrainian, Pashka is Russian. Both are grumpy. Circumstances have brought them together in a stubborn and sometimes adversarial companionship. This fragile co-existence is disrupted by the arrival of a Russian sniper in the village…

Adapted from the acclaimed novel by Andrey Kurkov, and set in the weeks before Russia’s invasion, Grey Bees is a powerful psychological drama about loneliness, powerlessness and uncertainty in wartime, and an important counterpoint to a world where war stories often overshadow human experiences. In July Grey Bees won the top feature film prize at the Odesa International Film Festival, this year held in Kyiv instead of Odesa due to safety concerns.