17-year-old Klaudia Bacza interviews Polina Piddubna on her debut film and the personal story behind it
‘My Grandmother is a Skydiver’ (2025).
May 9, 2025
Young filmmaker’s animation about the war in Ukraine to premiere at Cannes
My Grandmother is a Skydiver – a poetic animated documentary by emerging filmmaker Polina Piddubna about war and generational trauma – will have its world premiere at the Cannes film festival, running from 13 to 24 May.
The 13-minute short film is part of the official La Cinef competition, which is dedicated to showcasing works from the world’s best film schools.
“I can’t express my feelings when I see the laurel palm [the symbol of the Cannes festival] at the beginning of the film,” 24-year-old Piddubna told Harbingers’ Magazine. “After three years of challenges, it’s now going to the most prestigious festival in the world.”
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Polina Piddubna, creator of ‘My Grandmother is a Skydiver’.
Born and raised in Kharkiv and now based in Berlin, Piddubna is a filmmaker, artist and activist of Ukrainian and Central Asian Tatar and Bashqort heritage. She has a BA in animation and is currently enrolled in the MA programme as an animation director at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf in Potsdam. Her work often explores themes of identity, memory and resilience.
My Grandmother is a Skydiver is an intergenerational conversation across time, space and history. At its core is a deeply personal yet politically charged story: Piddubna’s quest to reconnect with the life of her grandmother, a progressive woman from Central Asia, set against the backdrop of recurring wars and cultural displacement.
“This film is my vision of what is happening,” Piddubna said.
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Through experimental animation, the film stitches together family memory, feminist history and the trauma of war. Piddubna traces her grandmother’s movements from 1960s Tajikistan across Central Asia, weaving those personal histories with her own family’s present-day suffering in war-torn Ukraine.
“The places where my grandmother used to live when she was young. The house in Ukraine, which symbolises the place of reflection, memory. And then another location is this black sequence of wars through different times to show all these constant horrors my family was experiencing – and still is,” the filmmaker explained.
The film gains an added layer of poignancy in the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which directly impacted her hometown of Kharkiv and her own family. The experience of generational trauma and resilience became the emotional backbone of her project.
As part of her bachelor’s thesis, Piddubna took on an enormous creative and logistical challenge. “I am the author, director and producer, so I took on all the responsibilities, managing a team of more than 35 people. I learned a lot,” she recalled. “There were moments when even my professors didn’t believe in the project – but I pushed through because I knew I could do it.”
She also credited the community of supporters around her for keeping the dream alive. “Even before the film existed, I met people who were interested, and they were the ones who were pushing me. That helped me believe in myself.”
Animation, she said, offered her the creative tools to navigate complex emotional landscapes.
“I started creating animation when I was 13. The reason I think animated documentaries are impactful is because you have so many tools: colour, movement, sound, design, and voice. You can transmit so many feelings, so many images.”
She hopes the film will help audiences connect with their own experiences. “It has many, many layers. I want people to process their trauma, to see that someone else has gone through something similar. To learn something new. It spreads awareness and knowledge,” she said.
At a time when wars in former Soviet countries are often overlooked or misrepresented, My Grandmother is a Skydiver stands as a powerful reminder of untold stories and unseen pain.
Her message to young creatives is one of self-belief. “One of my pieces of advice would be to know your power. Don’t make decisions based on other people’s opinions. In the end, it’s your feeling, your artwork.”
Empowering and bittersweet, the film explores what it means to break a painful cycle. “It’s sad, but when you finish watching, it’s a good feeling,” Piddubna concluded.
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