The River: Beauty & Hate by Vadym Sapatrylo

An experimental short film by Vadym Sapatrylo about the Kremenchuk reservoir — the largest in Ukraine, created between 1956 and 1959, when 212 villages were flooded and their residents resettled from the valley. Despite that history, the landscapes remain strikingly beautiful, and the film is less about the people displaced than about the feelings the water evokes.

This was the first collaborative project realised together. The cartographic part renders seasonal change across the reservoir as a stop-motion sequence, assembled from Sentinel-2 multispectral imagery. The film was selected as a Vimeo Staff Pick and picked up some media coverage.

Film & edit: Vadym Sapatrylo · GIS & cartography: Fedir Gontsa

Process

A custom script handled the full pipeline: searching for scenes, downloading them, and processing the multispectral data into the final frames automatically. The sequence drew on just over 280 scenes — 7–8 GB of source data — and took nearly two months to compile.

At the time direct download speeds to Ukraine were throttled to kilobytes per second. To work around this, the pipeline ran on a VPS in France (DigitalOcean): the script fetched and processed scenes there, staged them on mega.nz, and only then pulled them down locally — far faster than downloading the source data directly.