Graduation Short Film Competition
My Grandmother is a Skydiver
Director Polina Piddubna
Country Germany
Year 2025
Duration 5′
Alfyia, a joyful young woman in 1960s Central Asia, practices skydiving and studies to become a midwife, when in 2022 she receives an extraordinary phone call from her granddaughter. The granddaughter is worried about her grandmother’s safety during the invasion of Ukraine. In this intergenerational conversation across time and space, the granddaughter seeks to reconstruct and rethink family memory and her own ethnic identity, break the endless cycle of collective trauma, and reflect on the meaning of human life.
Polina Piddubna
A filmmaker, artist, and activist with Ukrainian as well as Central Asian Tatar and Bashkir roots, Polina was born and raised in Kharkiv, started her career in Kyiv, and has been living in Berlin since 2019. She is currently completing her Master's degree in Animation Directing at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf in Potsdam. Her graduation film, My Grandmother is a Skydiver, had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.
