Production Designer
As for the plot, a provincial school teacher who wishes to save her family from implosion and crushing debt persuades her husband and children to sign up for a state-run programme focusing on European integration, dubbed "Lessons of Tolerance". In accordance with this programme, they have to house an LGBT representative and activist in their home for a certain period of time. Now the family is forced to grapple with their own homophobia and their rejection of “otherness”.
Production Design
There is a ballad written by Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko called “That Catherine's hut is on the hill...". It is about a rescue of Catherine's lover, whom she saves by posing him as her brother. This story, as a parable, flies throughout Ukraine's history and reconstructs its dramatic and heroic episodes. Every challenge, including the Chernobyl accident, leaves Catherine without her home. But she is stubborn, as many generations of Ukrainians, in rebuilding her house out of pieces. The story is not only about Catherine's redemption, but also about Ukraine's survival throughout the centuries that is reflected in a folk tradition called Toloka.
