U Are the Universe

Pavlo Ostrikov's U Are the Universe (Ukrainian: Ти — космос) won the Silver Méliès for Best European Fantastic Film at the European Fantastic Film Festivals Federation (Strasbourg) 2024 and the Asteroid Award at the Trieste Science+Fiction Festival 2024. It was widely considered one of the strongest Ukrainian-language features of the war years and the first Ukrainian science-fiction feature ever to receive significant international festival recognition.

The film is Ostrikov's debut feature, made on a Ukrainian-Belgian co-production basis with substantial assistance from the Ukrainian State Film Agency despite the wartime production conditions. Ostrikov shot the film in Kyiv with intermittent disruption from air-raid alerts across approximately ninety days of production through 2023; visual effects work was completed at Belgian and Polish post-production houses outside Ukraine. The screenplay is by Ostrikov himself.

The cast pairs Volodymyr Kravchuk in the central male role and the breakthrough screen debut of Daria Plakhtii in the female lead. The visual effects work — particularly the spacecraft interior, the surface-of-Jupiter sequences, and the genuinely unusual atmospheric work on the central radio-contact dialogue — was widely treated as the most accomplished science-fiction effects work in any Ukrainian feature to date. The film opened in Ukrainian cinemas in December 2024 and grossed over a million dollars at the domestic box office; its international festival run extended through 2025 with prizes at Cottbus and Strasbourg, and broader theatrical and streaming acquisition through Drafthouse Films for the U.S. market.