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Gallery Entry

When I Grow Up

By Natalka Tsybulska · US

“When I Grow Up” is a short film about childhood, memory, displacement, and the quiet resilience of imagination. The story follows a mother and her six-year-old daughter, Sonya, forced to leave their home because of war. While the adult world is shaped by fear, uncertainty, and loss, Sonya continues to see the future through the uncomplicated language of childhood: what she wants to become when she grows up. The film explores the contrast between a child’s inner world and a reality she is too young to fully understand. Ordinary details, gestures, memories, and imagined possibilities become a way of preserving something that displacement cannot easily take away — identity, hope, and the freedom to imagine a future. At its core, the film is not about technology. It is about a deeply human question: what remains when home, safety, and certainty are suddenly taken away? AI was used as a filmmaking tool to visualize a story and emotional world that I conceived, directed, edited, and shaped through repeated creative decisions. I wanted the technology to remain almost invisible, allowing the relationship between mother and daughter — and the child’s ability to keep imagining tomorrow — to remain at the center of the film. “When I Grow Up” asks us to see war not through statistics or spectacle, but through the small, intimate perspective of a child who still believes the future belongs to her.

Category
VIDEO
Approved
1 October 2026