20 April 2026

Odesa Film Festival winner killed near Avdiivka

(PHOTO: National Union of Cinematographers of Ukraine)

Ukrainian film director, winner of the Odesa International Film Festival in 2016, Igor Malakhov, has been declared dead and will be buried on April 21.

This was reported by the National Union of Cinematographers of Ukraine.

The director was identified by DNA, and before that he had been missing since December 29, 2023. He died in the fighting near Avdiivka near the village of Stepove. Igor Malakhov is a Ukrainian film director, documentary filmmaker, screenwriter and historian. He would have turned 60 on May 26. He was born and raised in Kyiv. He studied at the Maxim Gorky Kyiv State Pedagogical Institute (now the Mykhailo Drahomanov National Pedagogical University) and the Gerasimov All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography.

Music Lessons is a movie about a talented girl, Olya, 9 years old. Olya lives with her grandmother because her mother is in one "country" and her father is in another. This is the second year she and her grandmother have been living away from home. There is shooting at home - they are from Donetsk. This is a movie about childhood, about friendship, about gold medals at music competitions. This is a movie about Ukraine. About what is here and now.

In 1997-2000, he worked as the deputy director of the Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Studio for young cinema. In 2016, Malakhov's documentary Music Lessons won a prize at the Odesa Film Festival. Among his other works are His Own Destiny. A Dream, Odesa, 14 Utesova Street, The Voice of Donbass, How the War Began. Chronicles, Witnesses", "The World. Ukraine. Chernobyl".

Earlier, the oldest resident of Kilia in Odesa Oblast, poet Nina Chernobykina, died on April 18 at the age of 104. Volodymyr Teravsky, an honorary resident of the Artsyz community in Odesa Oblast, an honored surgeon and longtime employee of the Artsyz hospital, died on April 17 at the age of 90.

Кирило Бойко

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