When Lightning Flashes Over the Sea (2025)

Eva Neymann | Ukraine, Germany | 2025 | 124 min | PG13 (Some Mature Content) An ethereal portrait of Odesa and its travellers, cats, labourers, artists and children who go on dreaming and surviving amidst war. Carefully assembled from months of footage filmed in Odesa, Eva Neymann crafts a wartime documentary film that transcends destruction through poetic observation. Her camera roams the city, voyeuristic, but patient, inquisitive and sensitive. In ostensibly disjointed vignettes it peers through windows of life and work, watches cats play, rain fall, tourists’ selfies, torches hurrying under air raid sirens. It lingers with people old and young, who share profound dreams and ruminations on pasts, futures, joys and struggles when seen and listened to. Flowing like a dream peppered with levity, wonderment and tenderness, the quotidian, marginal, quiet or broken facets of this city are foregrounded, stating boldly: life goes on.