Screening of 'Zelensky' + Q&A with filmmaker and journalist Ariane Chemin

You're invited to the free screening of "Zelensky" (2025), a powerful documentary retracing the Ukrainian president's early lives as an actor, comedian, TV star, and many more. Followed by a Q&A with filmmakers Ariane Chemin and Yves Jeuland.

Practical information: This event will take place in Betts Auditorium on Sunday, November 16 from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM and will include light snacks and drinks.

Synopsis: The film paints a portrait of Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine – in Kryvyï Rih, the town of his roots and education, and Kyiv, the capital of his success in the world of show business and the audiovisual industry – through astonishing images and privileged witnesses. As well as featuring an interview with Zelensky, this film will centre around the men and women who have known and worked with him from his earliest childhood right up to the present day. Also featured in this film: the team who surrounded him in the exercise of power and those who have stayed by his side since the beginning of the war.

But there’s more to the story than that. In 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky presented himself as a new man – young, with no political past, different from the Russian apparatchiks in place before independence in 1991 or the oligarchs left behind. He “sold” himself as the first president of independent Ukraine. Yet Volodymyr Zelensky was born in 1978, at a time when the big Soviet brother was extending his hold and imprint over all the countries of the empire. To be born and grow up at that time was to receive a communist education. This is obviously a taboo subject for a young resistance leader from a state besieged by Putin’s Russia, a former KGB cacique. But neither did he talk about it during his campaign.

Sponsors: Princeton Film Festival Society, Forbes College, Graduate Student Government Board (Diversity & Inclusion), Ukraine at Princeton, French & Francophone Society

This event is open to all regardless of identity.