Stanislava Doronchenko

With My Own Voice

Stanislava Doronchenko, filmmaker, film/TV director and editor

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Stanislava Doronchenko was born in 1995 in Mariupol and graduated from the Mariupol College of Arts. In 2018, she graduated as a documentary filmmaker from the Karpenko-Kary Kyiv National University of Theatre, Cinema, and Television (Valentyn Marchenko’s workshop) and worked as a director on leading Ukrainian TV channels. Her diploma film My Friend Don Quixote was in the program of many Ukrainian film festivals, including DocuDays UA (2019). Since 2018, she has been working as a first AD and line producer in the Ukrainian film industry. Now she is working as a film/TV director and editor in Poland and a filmmaker in her own right. In 2023, she received a master’s degree from the Karpenko-Kary Kyiv National University of Theatre, Cinema, and Television.

Project Description

With My Own Voice is a docu-animation short-length film that will tell the story of the Ukrainians’ migration as an eternal problem and will touch on the topic of authentic music in Ukraine and Poland. Due to the war in Ukraine, I found myself as a forced immigrant in Warsaw. The circumstances of a foreign country with a different culture provoked me to reflect on my own identity. The desire to rely on something of “my own” makes me look into the past, to the history of my ancestors—and here I find the history of migration. It's about the story of my great-grandmother, a Ukrainian woman, Vira Shevchenko, whose parents moved to the Far East. She was born and raised in a foreign country, and in the post-war years she became a migrant again when she went to Moldova. My grandmother always said that her mother was Russian from Vladivostok. But despite this, my great-grandmother sang Ukrainian songs. Apart from the memory of these songs, any trace of Ukrainianness in the family disappeared completely. I want to create a film-dialogue with an unknown memory, an attempt to recreate the life story of a person who became for me a kind of a “thread” to my own roots. The film has two plots: the first one tells the story of my great-grandmother—partially real, and partially fictional. This storyline will be embodied in the form of animation. The second plot of the film is of a documentary nature. It is a personal story about finding your own home—also told through a Ukrainian song.