This Blossom Feels Different

Lesia is a 40-year-old theatre director who runs a children's theatre studio in her home village and dreams of building a personal paradise on her ancestors' land — a picturesque village in the Poltava region, on the banks of a river, among rolling hills, blooming meadows, and dense, winding forests.

The war has become routine. Women in mourning clothes go about their daily errands. Fewer and fewer young men and women show up to work out on the outdoor gym bars by the school, and the drones passing over the village barely draw a second glance.

Lesia's husband Pavlo — her colleague and closest friend — has been fighting for three years. Their seven-year-old daughter Halia, a withdrawn little girl, draws comics about the war and uses words she shouldn't know.

Lesia is preparing a children's performance on the theme of ecology, funded by a grant. When a reconnaissance drone strikes the roof of a house in their relatively quiet village, families begin taking their child actors abroad, and the production falls apart. Lesia desperately tries to save the show, constantly reworking the cast size and the script.

The world Lesia has spent years building begins to collapse on another front too: Pavlo, recovering at home from a minor wound, tells her he has fallen in love with a sister-inarms — a woman much younger than Lesia.

Lesia's mom believe her granddaughter's safety matters more than a theatre nobody in the village needs, and press Lesia to take the child and leave.

On top of everything, Lesia notices the first signs of aging and finds herself in the grip of a personal crisis — one she feels she has no right to be having in wartime.

She finds comfort in the arms of a former student, 27-year-old Katia, who has come back to her parents' place to plant potatoes.