Writer / Director / Performer
I make movies about people who are absolutely fine.
Lera Dubitskaya, 27, is a Belarusian-Polish painter in Warsaw. Twelve minutes on 16mm and 8mm about what it costs to make art in a country that isn't yours.
A girl from Belarus, stuck in Germany's first lockdown, on the phone with a father who is certain COVID does not exist — while the world falls apart around both of them.
A two-minute poem on 8mm about a holiday in Croatia.
Just another shift for a team of jaded, bureaucratic angels — until they are handed the corrupt judges who sentenced innocent people, and find the same cracks running through their own system.
Jerry wants to send one message to a friend, and sets off a sentimental avalanche — courage, fear, childishness, humour and rationality wrestling it out in an epic battle sequence.
A young woman spiralling through the absurd rituals and quiet despair of the Berlin apartment search.
A girl and a boy wake up in an empty world where nothing fits. They travel to find their place, get more lost, and eventually find each other.
A girl imprisoned by the memories of her relationship, hiding inside eleven colourful days of quarantine in Spain — until the band start reminding her to wake up.
After narrowly escaping dictatorship as a child, pop star Katarina kept her music safely apolitical in order to enjoy a lavish, hedonistic lifestyle. But when civil war erupts back home and a bandmate is killed, the gift she buried to survive becomes impossible to silence.
Comedy / horror with songs. Developed at TFL Screen of Tomorrow; pitched at EFM Berlinale and Max Ophüls. UK–DE co-production planned.
A tragicomedy about two best friends from Belarus who reunite in Portugal and redefine what home means. Diana drifts through Frankfurt between ice showers and underpaid trend articles; after fifteen years of silence Nastya reappears with dark humour and an EU visa. On impulse Diana follows her to Lisbon.
If Black Mirror explores technology, RED FLAGS explores politics and love. Every episode is a standalone film, with its own genre and distinctive visual style.
Four relationship dynamics, one rented apartment abroad each time. Episode one on 16mm, episode two black-and-white screwball, episode three locked into 4:3, episode four alone in Iceland. Co-written with Clara Devantié. German, Russian, Ukrainian and English.
“What took our parents twenty years of marriage to realise, we experience in just five.”— from the director's note
None of these are shot yet. They are scripts looking for a producer.
A 12-minute musical short film about endometriosis and its odyssey of neglect. Meg gets her first symptoms in a supermarket, and as she passes out from the pain she is exposed to a horror musical of women telling her their own experience.
Anna (32), a Ukrainian economist living in Germany, and James (29), an architect from London, meet again at a comedy club — both quietly hoping the spark survived the breakup. On 16mm, in London.
A mockumentary portrait of a knight who happens to be a woman, talking us through how exhausting daily life in armour really is, and how somewhere along the way she forgot how to take it off.
A 5-minute deadpan comedy about a woman and her hair, told entirely from the hair's point of view. The hair has spent years being blow-dried, dyed, straightened and generally disrespected. One day it snaps and finally says what it thinks.
INT. VOID / MONTAGE
We see the back of a girl's head. The hair is all so different. A montage: blonde, curly, dark, brittle, medium curly, wavy, red, fluffy, afro. A choir of many hairs swells.
HAIR CHOIR (V.O.)
(one long, dramatic note)
HAAAAIR!
TITLE CARD: HAIR
NARRATOR (V.O.)
This is a story about hair. Hair is everything. What she wears, how she behaves, how she feels. Hair is a whole world. Hair defines the room. Just to make sure you understand.
INT. BEDROOM - NIGHT
STEFANIE (20s) lies face down in her pillow. She's whining. She's exhausted. She massages her hair.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Aww, poor thing. This is Stefanie. And this is NOT a story about her.
Stefanie's face scrunches up, confused. She furrows her brow.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Yes. Exactly. Has anyone ever asked how the hair actually feels? You selfish, little people.
Stefanie ties her hair up, then clips it with something. She sits, reading a book before bed. And THEN. A voice.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Why, STEFANIE. Why?
Stefanie looks around, confused, flabbergasted. Wtf? She looks into the camera.
HAIR (V.O.)
YES. I am talking to YOU, you little brat.
STEFANIE
What?
HAIR (V.O.)
Ugh. That's it. I am DONE.
Full script: read the PDF ↗, or write to info@veronikabolotina.com
Rick Apelscord — a talented young inventor fleeing his dying planet — comes to Earth seeking a future and citizenship. But when his social credit device, Hellebore, glitches, he is forced to cheat, run, and fight against a system designed for him to fail.
Science fiction / political fiction. German and English. Written 2025–26.
A 90-second deadpan comedy. Two mermaids in a bathtub, deep into an aggressively curated wellness night, casually taking apart the myths people still believe about the female body. Mythical creatures mocking human myths.
Studio2B GmbH · Amazon AWS / Kahoot series, 25 min, 2026
Kurzgesagt (In a Nutshell) · writing trial, 1 min, 2026
Warsaw Film School · script consulting on Violin, 15 min, 2024
Ireland Film School · script consulting on The Loneliest Man, 6 min, 2021
Dipsea and OGX · spec concepts
I started my journey in theatre school. I always loved the idea of building decorations and weird costumes and the whole world around me, and of being someone else. Later, frustrated by not knowing where to go with performing, I went to art school and learned storytelling from the perspective of someone who draws. That did not last long either.
When I immigrated to Germany, and then did my master's in London, I wanted to get deeper into the work of actors and into working with actors, so I took as many classes as I could to understand different techniques. To this day I look for a stage, stand-up or a role, where I can find a new side of myself and put it together with my writing.
These disciplines both live inside me, and in the end they come down to the same question. Who is the character, and how can you live through him.
“An intimate examination of painter Lera Dubitskaya's life and artistic practice — the difficulties she faces as an immigrant artist, and the conceptual landscapes her paintings explore.”Natalia Albin · Short Stuff · June 2026
I make movies about people who are absolutely fine. Films about displacement, told as comedy — because the alternative is unbearable.
I was born in Belarus and left for Germany at 18, looking for the artistic freedom a conservative post-Soviet dictatorship does not hand out. That move, from a closed country to the open and chaotic scenes of Frankfurt, London and Berlin, is still what my work is about: the roles people get handed, what migration does to a person, and the absurdity of politics.
I have been making people laugh since I was small. My mother calls me “a living cartoon.” While I was building a career in film, developing screenplays and running sets, I started doing stand-up in Frankfurt just before the pandemic. A fittingly Sad Comedy origin story. I brought both jobs with me to Berlin.
What I am after is the story that is funny and tragic at the same time, and the strange, difficult, unheroic people who usually get flattened into a stereotype or a villain, particularly Eastern European ones. My shorts and music videos have screened at Comic-Con, Lichter Filmfest, FiSH, Evolution Mallorca and Interfilm Berlin. I hold the Friedrich Ebert Scholarship for my BA in Germany and the DAAD Scholarship for my MA in London.
Download CV ↓Let's talk.
Write to me