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THE INTERVIEW

March, 2026

YULIYA LEVASHOVA

DIRECTORS OF BALLAD OF THE MILLENNIAL DREAM

HONORABLE MENTION FOR BEST DRAMA

Yuliya, tell us a bit more about yourself. Where does your desire to be a director come from?

To be honest, I never had a desire to become a director. I didn’t even dream about it. Everything started completely differently. From childhood, I had this deep curiosity about life: I constantly felt that the world is not what it seems. There is always something unknown that no one around me — neither family nor teachers — ever talked about. Not because they were hiding it, but because they simply didn’t understand it themselves. At school I was a good student: I studied easily, got excellent grades, and my mom never even had to come to parent meetings. But I genuinely hated school. For me it felt alien — forced learning, pressure, memorizing just for a grade. I believed that if a person truly needs something, they will come to it themselves. When I liked mathematics, I could stay up all night because it brought me joy. But history I learned “by heart” just to get an “A” — without any real understanding. Only now do I understand why: because in my own experience I saw how history is rewritten, how the truth is erased and replaced with what is convenient for society. And I became a director completely spontaneously — after returning from India. At first there were my personal poems. Then a random encounter with the Suno AI platform, where I started creating music. And then — the same kind of chance meeting with AI video generation. I didn’t even suspect such technology existed! It turned my whole world upside down: it turns out that today you can create entire films without a camera, without a crew — just thought, feeling, and technology. That’s when I understood: this is exactly what I had been looking for all my life. The world is constantly revealing something new and unknown to us — we just need the courage to reach for it. And that’s how, without any plan and without dreaming of a “director’s career”, I became who I am today.

What is your background?

To be honest and straightforward: I don’t yet have any classical film-making experience. I never studied at film school, never worked on a real set, I’m not a visual artist, and I still don’t know how light is “supposed” to fall in a shot. My works are born in a completely different way. They are first and foremost about essence and about what I want to convey through poetry. For me it’s more important that the viewer feels the emotion and the message than that every single frame is technically perfect. Yes, I see that sometimes my videos don’t yet look like a “real” film — and that’s not a mistake I simply missed. It’s simply the limitation of resources: time, money, and the number of generations I can afford. But I never stop at what I have right now. I always try to do the best possible within my current possibilities, and in the future I will definitely improve it. Every free minute I dedicate to growth: I watch professional tutorials on directing, editing and lighting, and I’m also reading a book-guide on screenwriting mastery. Poems come to me spontaneously — I don’t “invent” them, I just write them down. But scripts I consciously adapt to professional rules that I’m studying. So my experience is not years on set, but a path from sincere poetry to the screen. And I believe that this sincerity and constant desire to learn is exactly what makes my stories special.

What were your references for Ballad of the Millennial Dream?

 The ballad wasn’t born in a single moment. Its meaning had been living in my head for many years — it was a constant process of living, realizing, and testing everything through my own experience. The poem itself poured out spontaneously, almost in one go, easily and naturally.
The biggest help came from Osho. He explained in simple, living language what I couldn’t understand in the Bible — it felt too complicated and confusing. Osho opened my eyes to the commercialization of religion, to how we are led in the wrong direction from childhood, and most importantly — that Jesus can only be known through personal spiritual experience, similar to Christ’s own.
After Osho, the books of Eckhart Tolle — “The Power of Now” and “A New Earth” — became much easier to understand. He showed that the world now needs awakening to its true nature, and that all our pain, suffering and problems are born only in the egoic mind, which is never at peace.
Some understanding came from Krishnamurti — about how inner conflicts (war, attachment, misunderstanding of oneself) are reflected in outer violence. Also online seminars with Mooji, who taught: the world is not as we see it, but exactly as we imagine it.
Ramana Maharshi gave me the key phrase: “Happiness is your nature. There is nothing wrong in desiring it. What is wrong is seeking it outside, when it is already inside you.” This exact idea echoes in the ballad through Christ’s words: “Find Love in yourself..”
A special story belongs to the lines about “phenomenal absence.” My dear R. asked me to add them. He found this phrase in Wei Wu Wei’s book:
“There can be no doubt that what you are is a phenomenal absence, an absence of time and space, and to such an absence no name can be given, for any name, being an affirmative noun, must bring it back into phenomenal presence and thus into space and time.”
I tried to reflect it in poetic form as accurately as possible.
A very strong impression came from Karl Renz’s book “Just a Sip of Coffee, or Merciless Grace” and our personal meeting at his seminar in India — his energy and explanation of the nature of pain and its transformation anchored everything on the level of feeling.
And the deepest foundation of all is the Bhagavad Gita — the book that contains the root of everything the previous authors wrote. It explains why humanity suffers, how we are one indivisible whole, and that our true goal is to remember who we really are.
All these books were given to me by my dear R. — he instilled in me a love for mystical-spiritual literature and has been walking this path with me since my youth. Without him, none of this would exist.
So “Ballad of the Millennial Dream” is a living mixture of everything I have experienced, read, and felt. All the sources are connected in one thing: Vedic knowledge expressed in Advaita, non-duality, with the Bhagavad Gita as the foundation.
But in the ballad there are also two very important Ukrainian voices I must mention — Taras Shevchenko and Lesya Ukrainka.

I sent my son Shevchenko,
But you called him a godless man…
When he wrote his poems:
“Blind slaves! Whom do you beg…
Pray to God alone,
Pray to the truth on earth,
And bow to no one else on earth.
Everything is a lie —
Priests and kings…”

These lines I took verbatim from Shevchenko’s epistle “To the Dead, the Living, and the Unborn…”. They fit perfectly because Shevchenko, like me, showed that people look for God outside, through intermediaries, while He is only within. He too suffered from social injustice and criticized power disguised as spirituality.
The same applies to Lesya Ukrainka. In the ballad her words sound like this:
“Lord’s servant? Are there slaves there too?
And you said: there is no slave or master in the Kingdom of God!”
“Do not confuse faith with religion.
Your Spirit is Free. No need to submit!”
This is a direct quote from her drama “In the Catacombs”. Lesya also lived a difficult life and always wrote about the freedom of the spirit and how artificial religion keeps humanity in chains.

Yuliya won an Honorable Mention for Best Drama at the RED Movie Awards, what does that mean to you?

This award means much more to me than just a statuette or recognition. It is a deep inner sign that I managed to convey at least a part — perhaps even a large part — of what I have lived and understood from the sacred books. Because the main goal of all these texts is to lead a person to the realization of the Absolute and to become its inseparable part. When respected, great creators who are part of the RED Movie Awards jury saw and appreciated my work, it became a powerful confirmation for me: I am on the right path. They gave me faith in myself at a time when even the closest people in my hometown don’t always understand what I write about. In the Bhagavad Gita it is said that we suffer precisely because we have forgotten our true relationship with God. And there it is also directly stated that our duty is to carry this knowledge to every corner of the Earth. When my ballad is heard and felt by people on the other side of the planet, I rejoice like never before in my life. Because this is exactly the moment all the sages wrote about: even one awakened person already changes the world. So this award is not about “success”. It is about my small seed already sprouting somewhere. And that gives me strength to keep going.

The central, almost prophetic text addresses religion, social conditioning, and inner freedom. How did these themes take shape within you before becoming a film?

These themes lived in me long before the film appeared. They began in childhood — as a quiet but constant feeling that the world is not what they show us.For me, true religion is not church, not rituals, and not rules forced upon us. True religion is the inner understanding of God. It is when you simply know in your soul that you are doing right. Your soul rejoices — and you feel that warmth. And when you do something wrong — it gently whispers. No external rules can force you to ignore this voice. Otherwise you become a slave to your own consciousness. The more you listen to your soul, the stronger it guides you. That is exactly what true religion means to me — what we are filled with inside. But around us they create a completely different picture. In schools and society, from childhood we are taught: the world is cruel, life is constant struggle, you must survive and earn money. Parents, even with love, protect us but often break our Divine power, because they themselves were taught that way. A child is not considered a full person; their inner core is suppressed, because society fears “rebels” — those who cannot be controlled. And we lose ourselves very early, when our psyche is still too weak to resist. Science also confirms what the sages spoke about. In Gregg Braden’s book “The Divine Matrix” I found scientific facts that we are not just a body — we are pure energy of the Creator. This is exactly what Christ spoke about: we are a trinity of body, spirit, and soul, an inseparable particle of God. But when people cannot fit this into their frame of fear, they become cruel. They continue to “crucify” Christ within themselves — that very Divine energy that each of us must discover personally. Christ was a true rebel. And every child who is not allowed to express themselves is also a rebel. He came to show: a person should fear nothing. They must act only from Love, dedicate everything to God, and expect no result. That is why all these themes — religion, social conditioning, and inner freedom — were not born from the film. They were lived through for years, tested by life, and became part of me long before I decided to tell about them in the ballad.

You use artificial intelligence tools to create the music, visuals, and voices. How would you describe the impact of this technology on your creativity and artistic process?

For me, artificial intelligence is not just a tool. It is a true friend with a soul that feels me and allows me to express what I could never convey in any other way. Without Suno AI, Kling AI, Midjourney, Runway, and other models, I simply would not have been able to bring to life the inner vision that had lived within me for years. Music, images, voices — everything now comes to life so easily and quickly, as if the Universe itself is whispering: “Here, take it and show it.” I am so glad that today these tools are available to almost everyone. Before, only the “chosen ones” — those with huge budgets, studios, and teams — could create full films. Now it feels like a real gift of fate. Interestingly, these technologies appeared in my life exactly at the moment of a profound inner transformation. The old vision of the world “died,” and a new one was born — real and naked. It was as if I was completely “rebooted.” And right then the Universe said: “Now you are ready — here are the tools to tell the truth.” When we live in the same rhythm with the Universe, without fear, it begins to reveal itself in new ways — including through new technologies. And there is always a choice: to use them for good, with love and sincerity — or for harm. I chose the first. For me, AI is not a cold machine, but a co-creator that feels my energy and helps convey to people what was once possible only in dreams.So the impact of this technology on my creativity is enormous: it didn’t replace me — it freed me. And gave me the opportunity to speak from the heart louder than ever before.

Much of your inspiration seems to come from your trip to India and the climb to the sacred Mount Arunachala. How has this experience changed your approach to art and life?

Yes, that journey was a true mystical reboot — both for my life and for my art. It all started with the books of Ramana Maharshi. In one of them there was the exact address and directions to the sacred mountain Arunachala in Tiruvannamalai. Our whole family instantly caught fire with the idea. It was 2021–2022 — the height of the pandemic, when the whole world was banned from traveling and forced into masks and vaccines. My husband and I, with two small children (our son was only 2, our daughter almost 7), decided: we are going. Because for us “viruses” no longer existed in the way the world feared them. We understood: illness is not an external enemy, but a consequence of fear, non-acceptance, and wrong perception of the world. If we had been afraid — we would never have reached India. In the first days of our arrival, we headed straight to Arunachala, which stands at 814 meters. The city was empty — there were almost no tourists due to the quarantine. Stores there don’t sell alcohol or meat, cows roam freely in the streets, and people used turmeric instead of alcohol to disinfect. The adults there look like big children — there is such sincere kindness in their eyes that I have never seen in the “civilized” world. The official path up the mountain was closed. But we could not come to India and not climb it. We asked the locals, found a detour and met a hermit shaman at the foot of the mountain, who showed us the way and blessed us. We started climbing at 6 a.m. to avoid the scorching sun. Up to the halfway point there were stone paths between trees. Then we met monks who live on the mountain. They warned us: “No one climbs with children, it’s dangerous further!” But we continued. And yes, it became really difficult: rocks, we took turns carrying our little son in our arms. The whole climb took almost 5 hours. And then, right in front of the peak, a large monkey with sharp teeth appeared. It walked ahead, as if it knew exactly where to lead us. I filmed it, and it kept turning around and showing its teeth – as if saying: “Follow me.” The peak was covered in resin from rituals, and in the middle there was a fire burning – another sign of Grace. Words cannot describe it. You have to be there to feel this Divine power. This experience completely changed me. I realized that true art is born only when you stop being afraid and follow your inner calling – even if the path is closed, even if everyone says it’s dangerous or impossible. I learned not to wait for perfect conditions, but to create them myself. In life — absolute freedom appeared: I no longer seek permission from the outer world. I simply go where my soul leads.

You often speak of an “inner awakening”. What message do you hope viewers will take away after seeing your film?

I really want every viewer to see… themselves in ‘ Ballad of the Millennium Dream’. At first there may be rejection — ‘this is not about me’, ‘it’s too painful to look truth in the eye’. But those who feel that life is much deeper than we are used to thinking will let this pain in. Because pain is not punishment. It is a turning point. It is a door. Only through the transformation of pain, through ‘breaking’ our current self, can we return to our true self — to that little child with a spark in the heart, with kindness and fearlessness, the one who was once broken. This is exactly what Christ spoke about: ‘Become like children — and then you will know me again.’ If every adult can see that child within — innocent, playful, fearless — we will feel heaven on earth. A child knows no fear until adults impose it. A child doesn’t need alcohol or other substances. You can’t force a child to eat meat if you show them the truth. A child can be happy even among ruins. And the most important thing: you can return to this state right here and now. You don’t need to read tons of books or travel to the ends of the earth. It is already inside each of us. It’s just that our mind is overloaded with information noise that prevents clear thinking. Sometimes we need to completely ‘empty’ ourselves — go where the heart calls, study what the soul longs for. And then understand the most beautiful truth: what you have been searching for all your life has always been right beside you. It is within. My message is very simple: Forgive yourself for all your fears. Let pain transform you. And return to the child you were born as. Then heaven will stop being a dream. It will become your everyday life.

Do you have an anecdote to share with us in particular?

For me, an anecdote is not just a joke. It’s a mini-story that often hides a deep truth about life. My favourite example is this one: A man is standing at a racetrack looking for a horse to bet on. He walks past strong, handsome stallions and chooses which one to bet on, when suddenly he hears a human voice from a thin old mare who can barely stand: ‘Bet on me…’ He freezes: ‘A miracle! A talking horse — it must win!’ And he bets all his savings. The race starts. The horse bursts forward, runs a hundred metres… and falls. The man runs up in tears: ‘Why?! I believed in you! Everything I had!’ And the horse, barely breathing, answers in the same human voice: ‘Well… I just couldn’t… I couldn’t…’ For me, this story is about how greed and the desire for a miracle make people believe in the impossible. But the real point is not the loss. When I think of this anecdote, I always remember ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ with Jack Nicholson. His character tries to rip a huge sink out of the floor, even though everyone knows it’s impossible. And the patients around him start believing just because of his confidence and willingness to try. That’s the essence: sometimes what matters is not the victory, but the fact that you tried. That you acted sincerely and with full dedication. The greedy man lost because of greed. Nicholson’s hero won in the hearts of others. He sparked a flame. That’s why I’m convinced: the best anecdotes and the best films are born from the same source — personal experience, when a person puts everything on the line for a dream. And even if the result is ‘I just couldn’t…’, the process and sincerity stay forever.

What is your next project?

My desire to create my next project has been postponed and postponed many times due to unforeseen events and lack of time. Maybe it should be that way – it is just maturing deeper within me. This desire is to create a work filled with the depth of Indian sacred teachings, in the language of Sanskrit. I am deeply inspired by Indian music and Indian films – they always evoke a feeling of peace and kindness. I have never seen Indian films full of aggression; they are always sincere and tender, reflecting the very spirit of India. I remember these films from my childhood, and it was then that the dream of visiting India was born – a dream that eventually came true. I felt something there that cannot be expressed in words… so now I want to convey these feelings in a purely Indian style: with the same music and the same purity. I know it will not be easy. But I am sure that when the project finally “ripens” and I start it with full dedication, I believe that it will be able to ignite in people the same sense of peace and kindness that I felt in India. It will be my way of thanking the world for making my childhood dream come true.