Olga Stuga
Olga is an artist-filmmaker and film director working at the intersection of documentary, fiction and experiential cinema. Throughout a decade, she has developed a process-driven practice in which audiovisual storytelling is both method and medium. Building on social observation and increasingly drawing on personal experience, her current work enters into dialogue with scientific perspectives and ancestral knowledge systems.
After developing a short film at a writing residency in France in 2021, Olga returned to Ukraine at a writing residency in France in 2021, Olga returned to Ukraine following the full-scale invasion in 2022 and began working on her debut feature. The project's research process has expanded her practice beyond cinema into spatial forms that emerge from the same inquiry. One of the threads explored in this documentary hybrid is also evolving into her next fiction feature.
At Last Ship, the artistic and spiritual aspects of her work continued to develop in harmony. The residency's unique location allowed her to explore tantric temples and sacred sites in Khajuraho and Kalinjar, as well as to undertake a short trip to Varanasi. These encounters became part of her ongoing exploration of mythology and ritual practices as forms of cosmology, living philosophy and systems of knowledge. Within this broader inquiry, Hindu traditions hold a particular significance for her, both personally and as one of the world's most extensively documented ancient knowledge systems.
This research continued through exploration of sexuality, its role and status in different traditions, as well as its representation on screen. During the residency, Olga revisited her experimental visual work and had the opportunity to show the sequence to Julius and receive his feedback. Having a first external viewer engage with the work was valuable in recognising its potential place within the film and developing the sequence further.