How can we understand what this war does to people? Alina Maksimenko and Olha Zhurba, two Ukrainian filmmakers, have found very different approaches to making life during the war comprehensible on film.
It is February 2022, and the fighting around Kiev forces filmmaker Alina Maksimenko to move to her parents’ village in the north-east of Ukraine. This is where she makes her film IN LIMBO. As the impacts get audibly closer, many neighbors flee. Alina and her parents decide to stay and have to learn to deal with this isolation.
In her film SONGS OF SLOW BURNING EARTH, Olha Zhurba develops a kind of diary of everyday life during the war. Her camera is direct, she is among and with the people. In her images, she achieves an intensity and closeness that is hard to resist. If there is such a thing as a soul, here it lies open.
The third film in this series gives a rare insight into the future of those who can no longer imagine a life on the Russian side. In their film DOM, Svetlana Rodina and Laurent Stoop accompany young Russian opposition activists who have left their country and found a temporary home in Tbilisi. It is their first stop in exile. Still connected to friends and comrades-in-arms back home, their path leads them into an undefined future.
