In the timeless haven of the Kuyalnik Sanatorium, vacationers and patients come to find a refuge and forget, for the span of a summer, the war raging around them.
On the shores of the Kuyalnik Estuary, near Odessa, Ukraine, stand the three imposing buildings that compose the sanatorium. A relic of the Soviet era, this resort and treatment center – originally designed to accommodate workers serving the state – still welcomes vacationers, who come to enjoy the estuary’s mud baths and find companionship, as well as individuals suffering from mild ailments, drawn by the reputation of the doctors practicing in this sanatorium. In Sanatorium, director Gar O’Rourke captures a summer season in this vestige of a bygone era. The feature-length documentary premiered at CPH:DOX 2025, where it was presented in the DOX:AWARD section.
That summer, the sanatorium’s management lamented the sharp decline in visitors since the pandemic and the outbreak of war with the neighboring country. Among the few residents, the director chose to focus his lens on a young woman struggling with infertility. A man nearing forty and his mother, officially there to treat his chronic back pain, but unofficially hoping to find him a wife. A woman suffering from psoriasis, triggered by the stress she has endured since losing her husband in the fighting between Ukraine and Russia. A soldier, wounded, returning from the front.
With elegance and sensitivity, without passing any judgment, Gar O’Rourke paints a portrait of these wounded souls. For several days, the residents undergo a variety of treatments: many mud baths, drawn from the estuary just beyond the center’s grounds; high-pressure water massages; and ultraviolet lamp sessions, inserted into the nose to eliminate microbes. Treatments that were at the forefront of modernity in the 1970s but have since fallen into disuse. Yet, more than medical care, it is psychological support that these individuals have come seeking in a country at war and weighed down by a declining economy. They rediscover a fleeting lightness as they sway at disco nights, granting themselves, for one summer, the right to forget the reality they live in.
Sanatorium is a richly layered film, addressing the war between Ukraine and Russia and its disastrous consequences for civilians, suffering from trauma and facing an uncertain economic climate, and highlighting the region’s environmental challenges by evoking the increasingly alarming desiccation of the estuary.
