Connecting with Ukrainian creativity one portrait at a time

Filmmaker Marc Wilkins is one of the few Swiss expatriates still living in Ukraine. He is raising funds with his film portraits of Ukrainians.

This content was published on April 21, 2022 - 09:00 April 21, 2022 - 09:00

Wilkins and his Ukrainian wife fled to Berlin on the first day of the Russian invasion. Once there, however, they found the inactivity and uncertainty hard to bear and decided to return to Ukraine. After five weeks in Lviv, the couple is now back in their house in the countryside south of Kyiv. They felt too homesick when they were away.

“We were in a state of shock,” Wilkins says of their first few days back in Ukraine. At first he was ready to do anything and everything to help his wife’s motherland and his adopted home in the war effort. “I wanted to join the army, evacuate people from Kharkiv with my car and do a lot of social media – but mostly I felt lost and didn’t know what to do.”

Opportunity beckons

A few days later he was contacted by his Swiss production company and they wanted to do something. And so #u4Ukraine was born – a project which aims not just to appeal for donations, but also to create a personal link between donors and civil society in Ukraine.

Through short films, Wilkins introduces individuals “who have been unable to go about their normal business since the beginning of the war but who are now doing incredible things”. The idea is to help people to help themselves – through direct donations and not through second-hand clothes or cans of food.

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/connecting-with-ukrainian-creativity-one-portrait-at-a-time/47529568?utm_campaign=teaser-in-channel&utm_medium=display&utm_source=swissinfoch&utm_content=o