LUKIA COSTELLO - docs from the heart

UkrainianAmerican - breathing the past Into the present

A Ukrainian-American filmmaker examines inherited memory, digital witnessing, and how proximity to violence reshapes identity and solidarity.

The film invites audiences into an intimate, embodied experience of living with its presence over time, creating space for emotional recognition and connection beyond specificity or scale.

It invites viewers to slow down, to feel complexity without resolution, and to recognize how history continues to live within us long after events recede from headlines and collective memory.

View a 3.5 minute work in progress sample above.

Currently in creative development & financing stages, the film draws from eleven years of lived and recorded memory, personal archives, social media fragments, interviews, and journals; woven together through an intuitive, editing-driven process.

Each revisited moment opens a dialogue between past and present, forming a living tapestry of diasporic memory and emotional truth. Additional grants are pending, while I remain immersed in the slow, reflective work of logging and journaling - listening for the story that wants to emerge.

Ukrainian American - breathing the past into the present is (supported in part by) made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature as administered by Art Services, Inc.