Home Cinema: a Ukrainian audio play

An ordinary trip to a premiere turns into a night locked inside a cinema. It smells of coffee, the projector grumbles, the doors stick — and between the small domestic details something not at all ordinary begins to show through.

Ignat comes to the old cinema to get away from everything: a familiar cashier, an almost empty hall, a little cognac. An ordinary evening — until the screen goes dark.

Home Cinema is cinema without a picture: live actors’ voices, sound spaces and music are composed like a film soundtrack, and the frame is left to the listener. It is the same directing that runs through the filmography — blocking, rhythm, off-screen space — moved entirely into sound.

The project site is built as a cinema programme: a playbill of episodes, a cast of characters to meet frame by frame, and a player that remembers where you stopped.

Episode 01, “First Show”, is a short cut of the first four scenes — the foyer, cinema and dreams, the projection booth, and the wait until morning. The continuation is in production; two more characters, the director Petrovych and the Man with an Umbrella, are already waiting behind the door.

The cast brings familiar voices from the filmography: Yuri Verchenko, who appears in Yoshlochka, and Valery Beskorsy, long-time sound engineer of the early films, now in front of the microphone.

The visual world is an authorial interpretation in the spirit of European adult animation of the 1970s–80s; the illustrations were generated after the play.