Marianna Novikova: For Victory! Actress Sofia Role

Who Is Marianna Novikova?

Marianna Novikova is a Ukrainian actress whose name reached a wide international audience through her role as Sofia in Valentyn Vasyanovych’s film To the Victory!, known in Ukrainian as Za peremohu! and presented in English as For Victory!. In the film she plays the wife of the central character, a filmmaker named Valyk, and her performance sits at the emotional centre of a story about family separation, artistic ambition and life imagined after war. The public record on Novikova in English-language sources is dominated by this one major film role; a birth date, childhood story or long list of earlier credits is not published for her in the same way as for longer-established stars. Novikova is an actress whose breakthrough has arrived through serious arthouse cinema rather than television fame, and whose most visible work so far is a performance in a film that won one of the major prizes at the Toronto International Film Festival. For audiences discovering Ukrainian cinema through its newest films, she is a name to learn now, at the point where a career is becoming more visible, rather than a name to look back on through decades of credits. The images in this article are AI-generated illustrations, labelled as such.

For Victory!: The Film in Brief

To the Victory! is a Ukrainian-Lithuanian comedy-drama written and directed by Valentyn Vasyanovych, who also plays the central character, Valyk, and serves as one of the film’s cinematographers. The film is set in a near-future Ukraine after the end of the war, and it follows Valyk, a filmmaker who is facing unemployment, isolation and estrangement from his family. He lives in Kyiv with his teenage son Yaroslav, played by Hryhoriy Naumov, while his wife and young daughter have started a new life in Vienna, having escaped there when Russia invaded Ukraine. Valyk clings to the fragile hope that normal life will return, that he will be able to make films again, and that his family will be reunited, even as the everyday evidence around him makes that hope look uncertain. The film’s tone blends comedy and drama, and its humour is often self-reflective: Valyk is shown making his own film, directing actors, talking to camera and appearing at a European film festival, where a scene in which he speaks passionately in Ukrainian and is asked to speak in English instead becomes a pointed comment on how Ukrainian artists are heard abroad. The production companies are ForeFilms, M-Films and Arsenal Films, and the film is spoken in Ukrainian with a runtime of about one hour and forty-five minutes. It is not a war film in the conventional sense of battle scenes. It is a film about what comes after, about the long, unglamorous work of living with what war has changed, and about an artist trying to keep working when the industry and the audience he knew have been scattered.

AI illustration: a bright apartment interior with tall windows looking over a European city

Marianna Novikova as Sofia

In To the Victory!, Marianna Novikova plays Sofia, Valyk’s wife. The casting is listed consistently across festival coverage, cast listings and reviews: Valentyn Vasyanovych as Valyk, Vladlen Odudeko as Vlad, Marianna Novikova as Sofia, Hryhoriy Naumov as Yaroslav, and Volodymyr Yatsenko as Tato, with further cast including Mykhailo Liubarskyi and Serhii Stepanskyi. Sofia’s place in the story is defined first by absence and then by meaning. She is not living with Valyk in Kyiv. She and the couple’s young daughter, played by Maria Odudenko, have built a new life in Vienna, while Valyk remains at home with their son. That separation is the film’s central family fact, and it gives Novikova’s role a particular weight. Sofia is not a villain for leaving, and she is not a symbol waiting to be rescued. In the logic of the film, she is a woman who made a decision for her child’s safety during an invasion, and who has since had to build an ordinary life in a foreign city while her husband holds on to a home and a career that war has interrupted. When Sofia appears, the audience feels the distance between the couple not only as geography but as different kinds of survival: one partner adapting abroad, the other waiting at home. Reviews of the film have noted that it ends not with a grand epiphany or a rousing call to arms but with a longed-for moment of quiet, everyday contentment, and Sofia’s presence is essential to that ending working at all. A film about reunion, or about its impossibility, needs the absent partner to feel real, and Novikova’s performance is what makes Sofia feel like a person rather than an idea.

Valentyn Vasyanovych and His Cinema

To understand Novikova’s role, it helps to understand the director she was working with, because Vasyanovych’s cinema has a distinctive method. He is known for earlier films including Atlantis and Reflection, both of which deal with how war affects Ukrainians, and To the Victory! continues that theme while shifting the timeline forward into an imagined post-war future. Vasyanovych works with long, locked-off takes, a restrained camera and a blend of fact and fiction that can make his films feel almost documentary even when the story is invented. In To the Victory! he again served as his own cinematographer, this time alongside Mykhailo Lubarsky, and the film’s visual calm is part of its argument: ordinary rooms, ordinary streets and ordinary conversations carry the weight that other films would give to dramatic incidents. He also cast the film from a circle of close collaborators and friends, with a tiny team of only six or seven people who helped each other by acting in the film and working behind the camera. That method matters for an actress in Novikova’s position. In a small, close-knit production, there is nowhere to hide behind spectacle, and a performance must work in long takes and quiet scenes. The fact that Vasyanovych trusted Novikova with the role of Sofia, the wife whose absence shapes the whole film, says something about the quality he saw in her work, even though the public record does not yet give us a long earlier filmography to trace. For viewers new to Vasyanovych, To the Victory! is an accessible entry point precisely because its central situation, a family divided by war, is immediately understandable, and Novikova’s role is the key to feeling it.

Toronto and the Platform Prize

To the Victory! had its world premiere in the Platform section of the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival on 7 September 2025, and it was awarded the Platform Prize, a jury honour given to one film in the section. For Novikova, the prize matters in a direct way. A film that wins at Toronto is seen, reviewed and discussed far beyond the festival circuit, and its cast becomes part of the conversation around it. Sofia is not a background role in that film, so Novikova’s name travelled with it into reviews and listings that described the film’s cast and performances. A prize-winning festival film also changes an actor’s career in practical ways. It puts a name on cast lists that journalists, casting directors and audiences actually read, it creates interview and festival appearances, and it gives future directors a reference point: this is the actress who played Sofia in the Toronto winner. Novikova’s career after To the Victory! will be watched with that context in mind.

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A Small Team and an Unusual Production

The production history of To the Victory! is almost as interesting as the film itself, and it helps explain the intimacy of Novikova’s performance. Around October 2022, after setting aside several initial concepts, Vasyanovych chose to write a screenplay inspired by his own experiences and the challenges of living through wartime. He developed the project with support from a Netflix-funded development grant, as one of 48 Ukrainian filmmakers selected by the Ukrainian Film Academy to receive such a grant, each valued at 15,000 US dollars. Lithuanian producers at M-Films then supported the film, in a concerted effort to help Ukrainian filmmakers following a call by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during the opening of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, under the European Solidarity Fund for Ukrainian Films and the Lithuanian Film Fund. In 2024, Eurimages funded the project with 70,000 euros as part of its European co-production support. The film was made by a tiny team of just six or seven people, all close friends of the director, who acted in the film and also worked behind the camera. Vasyanovych has described the project as supportive, giving the group a huge psychological release and a way to escape the stress of war for a little while, and in an interview before the Toronto premiere he called it a kind of collective psychotherapy. In May 2025, producer Volodymyr Yatsenko presented the film alongside other Ukrainian films at the Cannes Marché du Film. For an actress, working in those conditions is very different from working on a large commercial production. The cast and crew are the same small group, the days are shaped by friendship and shared experience, and the performance grows out of real trust rather than rehearsal schedules alone.

Family, Distance and the Meaning of Sofia

The theme that makes Sofia more than a supporting part is the film’s treatment of family distance. In To the Victory!, Valyk lives in Kyiv with his teenage son while his wife and young daughter are in Vienna, and that split mirrors the experience of many Ukrainian families since February 2022, when millions of people left their homes and families were divided between those who stayed and those who left. The film does not treat either choice as simple. Staying is not presented as pure heroism, and leaving is not presented as abandonment. Both are shown as responses to an impossible situation, with costs on both sides. Sofia, as played by Novikova, embodies the leaving side of that equation, and the film needs her to be sympathetic, complicated and real for its balance to hold. If Sofia were a caricature, Valyk’s longing would feel sentimental. If she were absent altogether, the film would be a monologue. Instead, the audience is asked to hold two truths at once: that Valyk’s hope for reunion is understandable, and that Sofia’s new life in Vienna is also understandable, built from necessity and care for a child. That is a demanding acting task, because it requires presence without over-explanation, and it is the reason this article treats the Sofia role as Novikova’s defining work so far rather than as a minor credit. The role also connects To the Victory! to a wider conversation in Ukrainian cinema about how to represent the war’s domestic consequences, not only on the front line but in kitchens, video calls, festival halls and the long waits between messages.

AI illustration: an empty railway station platform with benches and tracks in morning mist

What the Role Shows About Novikova as an Actress

Novikova’s earlier work is thinly documented in English-language sources, but the role of Sofia itself demonstrates three qualities. First, she can carry a part that works largely through relationship and restraint, in a film built on long takes and quiet scenes, rather than through showy speeches. Second, she can hold her own in a cast led by the director himself, in a production where the boundaries between cast and crew were deliberately blurred. Third, she can make a character who is often physically absent from the central household feel present in the story, which is a specific and difficult skill. Those three qualities are the ones casting directors notice, and they are the reason her next roles will be interesting to follow. No birth date, hometown, drama school or list of earlier theatre roles for Novikova could be confirmed from reliable public sources. Readers who find such details elsewhere should check them against primary sources, such as festival programmes, the film’s credits or reputable Ukrainian film databases, before treating them as fact.

Why For Victory! Matters for Ukrainian Cinema

To the Victory! matters for Ukrainian cinema because it does something few films have attempted while a war is still ongoing: it imagines the day after. Most war films are set during conflict, and most post-war films are made long after peace. Vasyanovych’s film, made during the invasion and set in a near-future after it, asks audiences to picture a normal life that does not yet exist, and to feel both the hope and the strangeness of that picture. That act of imagination is itself a statement, and it is why the film’s Toronto prize resonated beyond the festival. For Novikova, being part of that statement places her in a particular lineage of Ukrainian screen acting: performers whose work is tied to films that speak to the country’s present moment, rather than only to entertainment. The film also shows how Ukrainian cinema is now made: through European co-production, through small teams, through festival support and through grants designed to keep filmmakers working during war. Sofia’s story, a wife and mother building a life in Vienna while her husband waits in Kyiv, is part of that larger picture, because it reflects the real geography of Ukrainian life today, spread across Europe and held together by hope, messages and occasional returns. As Ukrainian cinema continues to tell these stories, performers like Novikova, who can embody them without melodrama, will be central to how the world understands them.

Where to Go Next

For readers who want to follow Marianna Novikova’s work, the practical starting point is To the Victory! itself, watched with attention to Sofia’s scenes and to the family situation they establish. After that, the natural next step is Vasyanovych’s earlier cinema, particularly Atlantis and Reflection, which show the director’s evolving treatment of war and its aftermath and help explain why To the Victory! takes the form it does. Readers interested in the wider context should also look at how other Ukrainian films of the same period handle family separation and return, because Sofia’s story is part of a shared national conversation rather than an isolated plot. Novikova’s international career is at its beginning, with one major, prize-winning role as its foundation. That is not a small thing. Many actors work for years without a role that reaches a festival like Toronto or wins a prize there. Novikova has that role now.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who does Marianna Novikova play in For Victory!?

Marianna Novikova plays Sofia, the wife of Valyk, the filmmaker at the centre of Valentyn Vasyanovych’s film To the Victory! (For Victory!).

What is For Victory! about?

It is set in a near-future Ukraine after the war and follows Valyk, a filmmaker in Kyiv living with his teenage son, while his wife Sofia and young daughter have started a new life in Vienna.

Did For Victory! win an award?

Yes. It had its world premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival on 7 September 2025, where it won the Platform Prize.

Who directed For Victory!?

Valentyn Vasyanovych wrote and directed the film, played Valyk, and served as one of its cinematographers alongside Mykhailo Lubarsky.

Is Sofia based on a real person?

No verified source describes Sofia as a portrayal of a specific real person. The film blends fact and fiction, and its screenplay was inspired by the director’s own wartime experiences.

What is known about Marianna Novikova’s earlier career?

Public English-language sources focus on her role as Sofia, and no verified birth date, training or earlier filmography could be confirmed.

Where can I learn more about Ukrainian films like For Victory!?

Start with Vasyanovych’s earlier films Atlantis and Reflection, and with festival coverage of To the Victory!, which explains its production and its Toronto prize.