The documentary by Alisa Kovalenko and Liubov Durakova, coproduced by Culture.pl, is an emotional record of the Euromaidan protests and a few months of the struggle of the war in Donbas.
When the revolution in Kiev starts, Alisa is 26 years old. She is a film school student, but most of all she is Ukrainian. The film’s description on the Millennium Docs Against Gravity website says that her film is the ‘emotional diary of a young woman lost in an unstable world. It’s a vivid picture of tragic experiences, feelings, and fears’.
In May 2016 Alisa Kovalenko and Liubov Durakova’s film won the main award at the 8th FIDADOC Agadir International Documentary Festival in Morocco. The film by the young Ukrainian artists has been presented at international film festivals in Geneva, Amsterdam, Zagreb, Brussels, Moscow, and Kiev. It was nominated for the prestigious EDA award, awarded by an international society of female film critics to female directors or female protagonists in documentaries.
Alisa Kovalenko told Culture.pl about the history of making the film:
Euromaidan and our fight in eastern Ukraine after that were important events for us and our country, we couldn’t not be there! As documentary makers we couldn’t not pick up a camera, history was happening in front of our eyes. I filmed the war, Liubov filmed me. We went to Andrzej Wajda School in Warsaw with the material. Together with Jacek Bławut we agreed that connecting these two threads – war and private life – is enough for the film. It’s difficult to speak about war in general, it’s easier to describe it with our own emotions, our individual story – that is when you can touch other threads, give them depth.
Jacek Bławut was the artistic mentor of the film. The film was made as part of the Youth about Youth (Młodzi o Młodych) project, created to give young artists from Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland a chance to make films.
DocsMX Festival is one of the most important documentary film festivals in Central America. It was previously known as DocsDF – the Festival Internacional de Cine Documental de la Ciudad de México. Nine Polish films were invited to the 11th edition of the festival: 21x New York by Piotr Stasik, End of the World by Monika Pawluczuk, Alisa in Warland by Alisa Kovalenko and Liubov Durakova, Casa Blanca by Aleksandra Maciuszek, K2: Touching the Sky by Eliza Kubarska, Snails by Grzegorz Szczepaniak, Cheerleaders by Sławomir Witek, the animated Documentary by Marcin Podolec, and Habitat by Arjun Talwar and Oliver Krüger.