U Are the Universe

U Are the Universe (2025)

Ти – космос

After the explosion of the Earth, the Ukrainian space trucker Andriy becomes the only human in the Universe until French woman Catherine calls him from the faraway space station. Andriy decides to see her despite all the obstacles.

Date of release
2025-04-24
TMDB
7.6 / 10 (94)
Runtime
1h 41m
Genres
Science Fiction, Adventure, Comedy
Director
Pavlo Ostrikov

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Kyiv
  • Awards: 2 · Nominations: 0. Including: European Science Fiction Society Award; Golden Dzyga Award for best film

U Are the Universe is a 2024 Ukrainian-Belgian science fiction-romance film written and directed by Pavlo Ostrikov in his directorial debut. It premiered on 7 September 2024 at the Toronto International Film Festival, and was released in theaters in Ukraine on 20 November 2025.

Production

The concept for U Are the Universe began while director Pavlo Ostrikov was a law student at the National Aviation University in Kyiv. He wrote and performed a short play, "Cosmos", in 2011, about the last person alive in space after the destruction of Earth. Switching careers to filmmaking after graduation, Ostrikov revisited the premise, writing the first draft of the film in 2015.

They pitched the film to the Ukrainian State Film Agency, securing further investment in 2020 and hiring actor Volodymyr Kravchuk and a French actress for the main roles. Principal photography was divided into two stages: simpler interior scenes, and more complicated exterior scenes in outer space, where the actors needed to be attached to cables. The first stage concluded in early January 2022.

Shooting resumed in autumn 2022. The production resolved the casting problem by hiring a Ukrainian actress, Daria Plahtiy, for the character's physical appearance, and a Belgian actress, Alexia Depicker, for the character's French voice, then combining the two performances. Several members of the cast and crew, including the lead actor, the voice actor for the robot Maxim, and the producer served in the Armed Forces of Ukraine during production.

Principal photography was completed by December 2022, with a substantial amount of post-production work remaining, particularly in computer-generated visual effects. For the spaceship's design and effects, the production worked with Ukrainian visual effects company Magic Room. The film's soundtrack came from Ukrainian pop music from the 1970s and 1980, with the aim of developing a "Ukrainian space" sound.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended