The Earth is Blue as an Orange is a story about a family living in the front-line warzone of Donbas, Ukraine. While the outside world is made of bombings and chaos, single mother Anna and her four children have managed to keep their house as a safe haven, full of life and full of light. Every member of the family has a passion for cinema, driving them to shoot, edit and screen a film inspired by their own life in a time of war.

What power does the magical world of cinema have in a time of disaster? How to picture war through fiction? Isn't art the ultimate way to stay human? For Anna and her children, filmmaking has become a coping strategy to transform their own trauma into a piece of art.

The film has a budget of 215,000 EUR. It received a grant of 45,000 EUR from the Lithuanian Film Centre as a minority coproduction in January 2019 and 85,255 EUR coming from the Ukrainian State Agency, along with funding from IDFA Bertha Fund Classic with a 16,000 EUR grant, and IDFA Bertha Fund Europe coproduction support with a 40,000 EUR grant.

The film is currently in the editing stage. It is being developed within the framework of dok.incubator, a European documentary rough-cut workshop, based on an individual tutoring for the whole creative teams (director, editor and producer). The workshop aims to help documentaries break into the international market and meet a wide audience worldwide.

The film is expected to be completed in the fall, with sound and colour postproduction in September 2019.

Production information:

Albatros Communicos (Ukraine)    

Moonmakers (Lithuania)
Giedrė Žickytė
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Credits:
Director: Iryna Tsylik