It was May 22, 2011, and the Cannes Film Festival was coming to a close. Maryna Vroda had just received the Palme d'Or for her short film Cross Country from director Michel Gondry. The 29-year-old Ukrainian filmmaker was over the moon as she headed backstage at the Palais des Festivals. Dancing and toasting, American actress Uma Thurman stretched her legs, and champagne was offered to the fortunate winners. Vroda took a glass and saw Gondry approaching her. "Don't kill yourself with this Palme. People disappear once they have it." She laughed without really understanding the warning and then returned to Ukraine the next day.

Twelve years later, on August 7, 2023, after a 48-hour journey from bomb-ridden Kyiv, Vroda, dressed in a black and white suit, presented her first feature film, Stepne, in the international competition at the Locarno Festival in Switzerland. The film is the fruit of 11 years of work. She didn't disappear, as Gondry feared, she just needed time. But Vroda also has justified excuses: she lived through the Maidan revolution, then the war.

The career of this 41-year-old filmmaker tells the story of her country's upheavals. Born in Kyiv in 1982, she was 9 years old when the USSR collapsed. She studied cinema in the Ukrainian capital and soon realized that the economic crisis had plunged the film industry, already stifled by the Soviet iron fist, into a state of hibernation. "When shoes are too tight, they break your toes," said the filmmaker. Despite all this, she managed to make a few short films, then came invitations to festivals and her first trips. Already, she was showing her attachment to her native land: for her passport, she chose to use the Ukrainian spelling of "Maryna," rather than the Russian "Marina."

Meanwhile, with each passing presidential election, Ukraine oscillates between its Soviet heritage and European aspirations. In 2010, as pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych came to power, Vroda created Cross Country as "an act of resistance." "Cross Country heralds the rebirth of Ukrainian cinema, devoid of a previous generation from which to draw inspiration. The filmmakers started from scratch and had to invent everything," said Anthelme Vidaud, former artistic director of the Odessa Film Festival and author of the book Ciné-Ukraine: Histoire(s) d'Indépendance (to be published by Warm on November 2). In Cross Country, teenagers wander through the forest in search of something elusive. "I wondered where my country and I were heading," explained the director.

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