LUKIA COSTELLO - docs from the heart

#UkrainianAmerican - breathing the past Into the present

is an emotionally resonant, semi-experimental feature documentary that traces how war reverberates through those who live just beyond its reach. It asks what it means to inherit conflict—not through geography, but through memory, ancestry, and love.

Rooted in my experience as a Ukrainian American filmmaker based in Buffalo, NY, the film unfolds through eleven years of collected fragments including journals, social media posts, voice memos, and filmed moments that trace my evolving relationship to identity, responsibility, and belonging. These personal reflections exist alongside conversations with artists, diasporic peers, and community members, revealing both shared and divergent ways inherited trauma and cultural memory are carried, resisted, and transformed.

Currently in creative development and financing stages, the film draws from eleven years of lived and recorded memory including 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. 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.