The PORT Festival team has created a new video project in Odesa

The video project On the Coast of Freedom, created by the team of the PORT Literary Festival with the support of the Ukrainian Book Institute, has been launched in Odesa.

According to the PORT Festival's communications manager Ihor Filippov, the project's goal is to popularize reading among young audiences and show Ukrainian literature as lively, modern, and necessary. The videos are published on the PORT Festival's social media and on YouTube, where most of the episodes are already available.

This is a series of short videos in which Ukrainian writers, poets, and cultural figures talk about language, identity, and freedom, with their voices heard against the backdrop of the sea, old courtyards, libraries, and city theater stages.

"On the Coast of Freedom" continues the idea of the PORT festival to return the Ukrainian presence of the South to the cultural map of the country. The project reflects on how the sea and the steppe shape Ukrainian literature, and how the word becomes a space of resistance and freedom.

The project consists of 30 videos filmed as part of the PORT festival at the Odesa National Scientific Library, the Puppet Theater, and on the streets of the city.

It combines three formats:

• Author's addresses - short monologues about literature, the South and freedom;
• Poetry readings - poems recited in iconic Odesa locations;
• Dialogues - conversations between writers about language, memory, and the future of literature.

Participants include Kateryna Kalytko, Volodymyr Yermolenko, Tetiana Ogarkova, Andriy Hayetskyi, Yevhen Lir, Nadiya Hlushkova, Anton Sanchenko, Orysia Demska, Sofia Chelyak, Maria Prydma, Sonya Kapynus, Valeriy Puzik, Lesyk Panasiuk, Maya Tulchynska, Oksana Dovgopolova, and Maria Galina.

The video series "On the Coast of Freedom" was initiated by the Vyshyvanka Festival NGO. The project is implemented with the support of the Ukrainian Book Institute at the expense of the state budget of Ukraine.

Кирило Бойко