17-year-old Ukrainian filmmaker, Tymur Tsapliienko, came to New York in June to screen his new film RETURN DATE: UNKNOWN at the Youth Collective Film Festival at Lincoln Center in front of 300 NYC-area high school students and he won Best Film.
The next week, the United Nations Association of New York hosted a sold-out screening and panel discussion including Tymur, Rom Barnea (his mentor), Holly Carter (BYkids executive director), Susan Bissell (Harvard FXB Center for Human Rights and former Global Chief of Child Protection at UNICEF) and Pablo Espiniella (Chief of Staff at the U.N. Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Violence against Children).
This film is part of the BYkids climate change series, airing on PBS this fall. It is a moving portrait of a boy coming of age — his relationship to himself, to home and his father. Tymur eloquently shares what it means to be a Ukrainian refugee and personalizes the high cost of the war and the world’s dependence on fossil fuels. Tymur’s dad, Andrii, is considered to be Ukraine’s leading war correspondent having covered Iraq, Afghanistan and now the war at his home. We were thrilled to have Andrii with us.
