Opening Film of Sofia DocuMental 2025: Divia by Dmytro Khreshko
The opening film of Sofia DocuMental 2025 contemplates the quiet defiance of the living world as it restores itself after the devastations of war.
The sixth edition of Sofia DocuMental, the international human rights documentary film festival, will be officially launched on September 25, 2025, beneath the domes of Sofia Largo with the Bulgarian premiere of Divia by Ukrainian director Dmytro Khreshko.
This year’s festival, held under the motto “Natural Intelligence Strikes Back,” opens with a co-production between Poland, Ukraine, the Netherlands, and the United States. Divia is a sound-driven, meditative odyssey across Ukraine’s scarred landscapes – a stark yet mesmerizing portrait of destruction beyond the frontlines.
Told without words or narration, the film speaks through imagery: forests reduced to ash, fields ravaged by explosions, flooded cities, rusting military wreckage abandoned in deserted lands where life has been extinguished. It is a haunting meditation that lays bare Russia’s unprecedented aggression on Ukrainian soil and its heavy toll on places that voice their accusations in silence. Yet nature refuses to yield – and just as it perseveres, so does humankind, with all its contradictions. Seasons turn, grass sprouts again, and within this hushed reality move deminers, ecologists, and rescuers, working to bring life back.
Khreshko turns his lens toward nature – toward the resilience of the living world that endures war’s devastation and, in a quiet act of defiance, slowly heals. Named after the Slavic goddess of nature, Divia is an encounter between ruin and beauty, where even contemplation becomes a form of resistance.
In 2024, Khreshko’s project was selected for the DOCU Rough Cut Boutique, a post-production workshop for documentaries from Southeast Europe and the Caucasus, organized by the Sarajevo Film Festival and the Balkan Documentary Center. After its world premiere in Karlovy Vary and a warm reception in Sarajevo, the film will now be presented to Bulgarian audiences by its producer Polina Herman.