Doc - There's No Place

Documentary Feature

Title: There's No Place

TRT: 90 min

Project Status: In Production

Logline 

When Daryna, a Ukrainian refugee in the U.S., struggles with isolation and dislocation, she makes the radical choice to return with her children to war-torn Kyiv. There’s No Place is a portrait of resilience, revealing how community and belonging can feel safer than exile’s emptiness.

Synopsis

Told through quiet observational footage and home videos, There's No Place explores how Ukrainians experience a rupture of time and space after the Russian full-scale invasion. In Ukraine, time manifests in constant physical alert. In the peaceful U.S., one is physically safe but emotionally on guard.

Daryna, 45, a war news editor, fled with her two children to a host home in Pittsburgh's suburbs where they slept together in one bed for a year and a half. Homesick, they buy tickets back to Ukraine, treating the trip as an extended vacation. Before leaving, the family dog-sits in a spacious mansion in Hilton Head, leisurely sunbathing and swimming. Just days before their return, a massive bombing of a Kyiv children's hospital terrifies Daryna, making her decide to stay longer. The family moves to a New Jersey friend's home and restarts everything: registration, ID, health insurance, new school, even searching for warm clothes.

Alienation accumulates, and Daryna changes her mind again, choosing to return to Kyiv before the school year begins. Back in Ukraine, we realize what was meaningful for the trio: family, friends, community, belonging. Her parents live next door; the kids play with cousins and friends.

Daryna continues cutting war news — now happening close to home. She volunteers, fundraises for friends who are fighting, takes paramedics training. She divorces her husband and finds a vacant apartment nearby to nest again, despite the risk that war can destroy anything at any moment.

Additional Project Information

Participation:
2026 - Edinburgh Pitch (Glasgow, UK)
2025 - Odesa IFF Work in Progress Pitch
2025 - DocCeleratorStory Lab (Denmark)

NOMINATIONS AND SHORTLISTS:
2026 - The Whickers longlist (UK)
2025 - Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund Nomination (USA)
2025 - Sundance Collab’s Cultural Impact Residency finalist

Team

Bohdana Smyrnova, Producer/Writer/Director
Bohdana is an independent film producer, screenwriter, director and editor exploring female narratives. Over 25 years, she held key positions on 50+ projects that won 70+ awards and screened at 350+ events worldwide. Bohdana was a Dean’s fellow in the MFA film program at New York University. She is an alumna of Cannes Film Festival Residency, Gotham Week, ScripTeast. With a background in character-driven dramas, Bohdana is now working on both narrative and documentary films. She is based in New York, USA and Chernivtsi/Kyiv, Ukraine.

Harry Mavromichalis, Producer
Harry is a filmmaker, producer, and educator with extensive experience in directing, producing, and writing documentaries, narrative films, and music videos. His debut feature documentary, OLYMPIA, about Academy Award-winning actress Olympia Dukakis, screened at major international festivals including DOCNYC, Thessaloniki, Hot Docs, and Cleveland International Film Festival (nominated for Best Documentary), and won Best Documentary at both Hunter Mountain and the Los Angeles Greek Film Festival. The film ran three years on PBS and appeared in Emirates and American Airlines in-flight entertainment. He co-directs Glorious Broads, a social media platform with over 400,000 followers celebrating women over fifty, and is developing a docuseries on sexuality and sensuality in that space. He also produced Waves Won't Stop (2025), an experimental documentary on identity and loss, which has screened in Cyprus and Nashville.

Olga Wagner, Director of Photography/Producer
Olga is a filmmaker based in NYC, originally from Moldova. Olga studied filmmaking at Wright State University, where her love for documentary filmmaking was nurtured and developed by the accomplished documentarian Steve Bognar. She completed AFI's Cinematography Weekend for Women and AbelCine Cinematography workshop. Olga works as a Cinematographer/Camera Operator/Camera Assistant/Drone Operator in the non fiction industry in NYC and beyond. Olga strives to craft profoundly personal and impactful narratives that resonate with and enrich the lives of others. As a cinematographer, she aims to illuminate these stories with poetic visuals, capturing the characters' emotions, states of being, and their connections to their environments.

Liza Pirozhkova and Sasha Lunina, Directors of Photography (Ukraine), were classmates at the Karpenko-Kary Kyiv National University, where they earned their Bachelor's degrees in Film and TV Cinematography. Both work in documentary and media as videographers, contributing to major Ukrainian outlets such as The Kyiv Independent, an English-language publication covering Ukraine, and Ukraїner, a multimedia Ukrainian studies project. They are resilient enough to cover events in war zones yet sensitive and perceptive when capturing intimate video observations. Sasha is part of Babylon’13 and Yellow Bus documentary collectives and Liza is a documentary director in her own right. They both are accomplished photographers.

Seeking

We are seeking funds/grants/coproduction markets and coproducers. We would love to partner with like-minded impact producers.

Contact

Bohdana Smyrnova

bohdana.smyrnova@gmail.com

1347-878-1464