When Russian bombs began raining down on her hometown of kyiv, Katya Hridina-But was pregnant with her third child and the proud owner of a film photography lab.
After a hectic year and a half, she is now settled in Berlin with her husband Dima, their eldest daughter now speaks fluent German and the couple offer their services to film enthusiasts in the capital of Europe’s largest economy.
In their Film Speed ??Lab (FSL) store, they say they offer a 24-hour negative development service to all lovers of old-fashioned photography that has been rising from the ashes for a few years.
“Films aren’t dead, demand is growing,” says the 38-year-old entrepreneur. An interest fueled by social media, which is not without irony, she notes.
Ukrainians “have the same interests as people in the United States or Germany, they all watch TikTok and take pictures,” she said.
The young woman, who gave birth to her child during her exodus to Chernivtsi, in western Ukraine, presents herself as the brain of the small business.
Her husband, exempt from mobilization because the father of three children, brings all his passion for photography to it.
The 40-year-old says he loves the “crazy emotion” emanating from a film which, unlike digital, requires patience before revealing its beauty and power.
– “Positive vibes”
He also says he likes the parks of their bobo and family district of Prenzlauer Berg, the modernity of his store, half lab, half living room, the warm welcome of the neighbors.
“People are interested in what we do,” he says. “They are very good people, the vibes are positive”.
The Hridina-But couple, who speak with AFP still mainly in English, have joined the still modest ranks of small entrepreneurs among the more than one million Ukrainian refugees registered in Germany since the start of the invasion. Russian.
Both overcame the hurdles of the dreaded German bureaucracy fairly quickly to launch their business.
Paperwork, “it’s just a peculiarity of the country, you have to go through it, and then everything works,” says Katya, who also received valuable help from German friends and some of their employees.
Their business is not yet profitable but the activity continues to increase.
They are now a team of five, mostly Ukrainians, to sell and develop color or black and white film and also offer ECN-2 processing for cinema films.
At the same time, they kept their shop in kyiv, which a dozen employees continue to run for them.
Germany has made an exception to the law for Ukrainian asylum seekers allowing them to immediately enter the labor market.
Some 36,000 had found stable employment in the country at the end of January, according to the latest data from the German government, of which a thousand were self-employed.
The FSL company has customers all over Germany, including refugees who frequented their shop in kyiv, such as Yana Isaienko.
The 22-year-old now works at FSL and feeds her dynamic TikTok account. She also got involved in the organization on February 24, a year after the start of the war, of an exhibition in the store showing a series of photos intended mainly for exiles who suffer from homesickness.
But these strong images also make it possible to anchor the war at the heart of the concerns of German customers, she judges.
Among his favorites are that of a Ukrainian grandmother with red cheeks making the famous “vareniki” cherry dumplings, and that of a “Czech hedgehog”, named after the improvised anti-tank obstacles that appeared in the streets of Kiev, with a flower whose stem is planted in metal.
With the invasion, “you start to think differently about your family, about your history. You want to put together as much stuff as possible,” she says.
Freelance Ukrainian photographer Stan Gomov, 27, likes coming to the store because it makes him feel “at home”, he says.
“And more generally, he adds, “it is important right now to support each other”.
24/06/2023 15:11:49 — Berlin (AFP) © 2023 AFP