Kateryna Pavlyuk is a Ukraine-born, London-bred documentary filmmaker. Infinitely fascinated by people and their relationships to places, her films centre on migration, displacement, community, and the cross-pollination of cultures.
She is a Papaya Young Directors finalist (2021) and has directed commissioned films for Al Jazeera and women’s NGOs. Her film for Latin American Women’s Aid was a finalist at the Charity Film Awards 2023, and her work has screened at festivals UK-wide and internationally, including the London Migration Film Festival, Sunday Shorts (Lisbon) and Tampere (Finland), one of the largest short film festivals in Europe.
Kateryna has made films about a young refugee chess prodigy navigating a new life in the UK (Al Jazeera); an Archbishop who established a boxing club in North London (The Boxing Bishop); and three generations of Ukrainian women reflecting on their distinct experiences of the Soviet Union, and the three decades since its fall (The Curtain).
Her micro-short film, Misha, was shortlisted for Encounters Film Festival’s Depict! competition, receiving a special mention for the Royal Photographic Society Cinematography Award, and in 2023 Misha was selected by Leeds Film to screen in schools, as part of an educational programme. In 2021, Kateryna was commissioned to contribute to H is for Hostile Environment, a collaborative artists’ film by Satellite Films, centred on first-hand experiences of migration to the UK.
After working in production for the UN, and producing films for leading arts and charity clients (Glasgow Women’s Library, St. Mungo’s), Kateryna completed an MA in Documentary Filmmaking at Goldsmiths University. As a film programmer, Kateryna has guest curated events for the Barbican’s New East Cinema strand and programmed an online film season, Feast from the East, for the Independent Cinema Office. She is currently developing documentary projects centred on misinformation, displacement, and notions of home.