About Julian

Documentary filmmaker from Australia, based in Kyiv since mid-2022.

Julian’s public Facebook profile lists Sydney as his hometown and Kyiv as where he lives. His public posts include remembrance, demonstrations and Christmas in Ukraine.

Kyiv Post describes him as an Australian Ukrainian filmmaker and journalist based in Kyiv. Since December 2024 he has written for it on Ukrainian culture, the defence technology and energy debates at the Kyiv Security Forum, Russian propaganda, the rule of law in occupied territory, and Australia’s part in sanctions and support for Ukraine.

He trained at Sydney Film School, where his first film, The Art of Walking, shot on super 16mm, won best cinematography, best editing and best composer at the school’s 12th festival. In Tasmania he directed Battle for the Tarkine, a documentary about the Tarkine wilderness.

In Kyiv in September 2022 he recorded an exclusive wartime interview with the filmmaker and soldier Oleh Sentsov. In 2025 he was associate producer on The Way Home, a short film about the Holodomor directed by Stefan Bugryn, which was announced to premiere at Flickerfest in Bondi in January 2025.

For the Australian Federation of Ukrainian Organisations he has reported from Kyiv, including 2023 interviews with Ukrainian defenders on the front line about the Australian Bushmaster vehicles, and footage of Kyiv’s Anzac Day dawn service in 2025. Kyiv Post also credits him with a 2024 interview with the bandurist and soldier Taras Stolyar.

In September 2022 he was guest programmer for the Sydney Underground Film Festival’s charity screening of Oleh Sentsov’s film RHINO at Event Cinemas, George Street.

The Kyiv story

He has lived and worked in Kyiv since mid-2022, early in the full-scale invasion. In July 2022 he was part of the media contingent that went to Bucha and Borodyanka with the Australian Prime Minister. A 2023 Kyiv Post feature on Ukrainian music video put it this way:

Julian Knysh is an Australian filmmaker of Ukrainian descent who has been living and working in Kyiv since the early part of the full-scale invasion period. He looks at Ukrainian film, video and other cultural development with both informed and independent eyes.

In his 2023 report from Kyiv for the AFUO he wrote:

The number of flags placed by families of the fallen into the grass at the end of Maidan is tragically more than ten times the number from when I arrived here

Four years on, he told the Sydney Morning Herald there is a “choiceless determination” in Kyiv to live life despite the war.

His own posts from the city record what that looks like: remembrance among the memorial flags in central Kyiv, the March for Dialogue and for Defence Reform, Christmas carollers, and the shelter signs painted on Kyiv’s pavements.