“Grey Bees” named best feature film at Odesa Film Festival

On July 20, “Grey Bees” by Dmytro Moyseiev won the top feature film prize at the 15th Odesa International Film Festival. This year, the festival was held in Kyiv instead of Odesa due to safety concerns.

The movie is based on the novel of the same name by Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov. “Everything starts with people,” said Moyseiev in the IFFR interview. “I was interested in this book because it wasn’t about the war first and foremost, but about the people.”

It tells the story of two childhood enemies who find themselves in the “grey zone” of an anti-terrorist operation in a small village in Donbas after the Russian invasion in 2014. The two men, who have opposing views and aspirations, are struggling to rebuild their lives in a war-torn area. Despite the danger, they are forced to coexist, leading to contradictory but necessary interactions. However, their fragile existence is disrupted by the arrival of a Russian sniper in the village.

Moyseiev’s third feature film, which he has been working on since 2020, premiered globally on Feb. 1 at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), where it was part of the main competition. The world rights holder is the Idas International Film LLC.

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“Grey Bees” is a novel by renowned Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov. It’s a tale of resilience praised by Kirkus as “a gentle story of survival in a war-scarred land.” Originally published in 2018, the book was translated by Boris Dralyuk and released in English in 2020 by MacLehose Press in the UK and in 2022 by Deep Vellum in the USA. “Grey Bees” has received numerous accolades, including the inaugural Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize from the National Book Critics Circle. The French translation, “Les Abeilles grises,” translated by Paul Lequesne, won the prestigious 2022 Prix Médicis étranger.

Dmytro Moyseiev is a Kherson-born Ukrainian film director who made his feature film debut in 2013 with “Such Beautiful People.” The film traveled the international circuit and won an award for cinematic work at the Lucania International Film Festival in Italy. Moyseiev founded Yizhak Film LLC, a production and distribution company, in 2014.

Odesa International Film Festival is an annual film festival that was held in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, this year. It was founded in 2010 to popularize high-level intellectual films among Ukrainian viewers and to support development of cinema inside the country and on the international stage.

Copy editing: Joy Tataryn, Terra Friedman King