ALL FILMS / Grandma Didn't Like Dying
A three-generation family saga set in an Eastern Ukrainian mining town, where love is a luxury few can afford — and survival demands strength, anger, and dark humour.
Type: fiction series
Genre: family saga, dramedy
Length: 8 x 50 minutes
Screenplay: Pavlo Belianskyi
Producer: Andrii Korniienko
Production: Good Morning Films
Country: Ukraine
Production stage: Development
Budget: € 2 400 000
Based on the book Grandma Didn’t Like Dying by Pavlo Belianskyi
A brutally beautiful family saga spanning several generations of one mining family in Eastern Ukraine. Across decades of Soviet and post-Soviet history, the men and women of this clan keep chasing personal happiness within a home that never knew love. Each of them lives and dies alone — trapped in the house they keep rebuilding from the ruins of their parents’ pain. Belianskyi’s intimate and merciless prose unfolds as a sweeping, cinematic mosaic: ironic, tragic, tender, and unflinchingly honest.
STRUCTURE OF THE NARRATIVE
Each episode opens with a single shared moment — a family gathering at the Home in different times: a celebration, a funeral, or the birth of a child. Through this recurring scene, we glimpse the whole clan together, bound by one heavy house. From there, every episode unfolds in flashbacks and flash-forwards (1930–2014), revealing the secret life of one family member — and the echoes that bind them all.
THE DONBAS UNIVERSE
in the years following the fall of the Soviet Union, captured in photographs by renowned photographer Alexander Chekmenev
