by FIlmInk Staff
Following wins at the Seville European Film Festival (SEFF) for “Best Short Film” and premiere screenings in Portugal and Spain, the short film In Her Arms (2026) continues its international festival run with selection for the 2026 Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) – one of the world’s most iconic film festivals introducing bold auteur cinema to global audiences.
In Her Arms is the only Ukrainian-produced film out of over 300 in this year’s MIFF. Beyond international recognition, selection to MIFF gives the film a shot at Oscar-qualifying status: a win in the competitive program would place it on the Academy Awards shortlist for Best Live Action Short Film.
The screening marks the film’s Australian premiere, and another international stage for a Ukrainian story about life after Russian occupation. This time, it will reach audiences on the other side of the world, and is the first purely Ukrainian-produced film selected since Iron Butterflies (MIFF 2023).
The story follows a married couple’s return home after de-occupation. In their house lies a leftover tripwire booby trap. As they try to resume ordinary life, the war doesn’t recede – it lingers, seeping into daily routine. Reality takes on a surreal edge, and the booby trap becomes a symbol of the evil occupying forces leave behind, even after they’re gone. “We understood we couldn’t wait for ideal conditions,” says producer Zlata Yefimenko in Kyiv. “This story needed to be told now, while it still hurts and resonates. Winning in Seville is urgent proof that Ukrainian voices need to be heard on international screens.”
According to director Roman Volosevych (Kyiv), the film aims to explore the least-visible aftermath of invasion. “It’s focused on a fragile, often-invisible process of returning home – on trying to piece daily life back together from the wreckage of a ‘former life’ in a personal space. Viewers will feel that nothing will be the same again,” the director says.
The tripwire at the film’s centre was inspired by a news report from de-occupied Bucha contributed by co-writer Ihor Zaitsev, where Russian soldiers left a grenade inside a piano in a family’s home. That image became the starting point for the ongoing traces war leaves, and also feeds the film’s unique visual aesthetic from Dmytro Zahlynskyi.
Among the film’s crew is Melbourne native and 2006 MIFF worker Richard Pettifer (Subtitles), now collaborating with artists from Ukraine in Berlin since the invasion. The film was produced by the Ukrainian company EF Pictures, with support from the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation and the State Film Agency of Ukraine.
Team
Director — Roman Volosevych
Producer — Zlata Yefimenko
Screenwriters — Roman Volosevych, Ihor Zaitsev
Director of Photography — Dmytro Zahlynskyi
Production Designer — Vassa Bahalika
Composer — Nazar Slobodianyk
Cast: Dasha Legeida, Akmal Gurezov, Volodymyr Zakharchenko, Oleksandr Ivanov, Dmytro
Konyk, Valerii Latko
MIFF program page: https://miff.com.au/program/film/in-her-arms
