How well do you understand the crisis in Ukraine? Or war in general? If you have never thought about the events in Crimea, you certainly will after watching this disturbingly honest documentary by Alisa Kovalenko and Liubov Durakova.
Alisa in Warland is named after Alisa Kovalenko, one of the two directors of the film. She was a 26 year old film student, when President Viktor Yanukovych refused to sign the association agreement with EU. People took to the streets to demonstrate against the president. Alisa took her camera and joined the crowds. The tides of change could not be stopped and the upheaval turned into a revolution. Alisa and her camera were plunged deeper and deeper into the turmoil taking over the divided land.
Alisa in Warland is an unflattering documentary about war; what it looks like, sounds like, and feels like. Kovalenko and Durakova take their shaking cameras to the heart of the conflict, to the streets echoing with rifle fire, where every breath is heavy with fatigue and anxiety. At the ruins of the once lively suburbs and cities bullets and bodies are brutally real. There’s an abundance of armies and enemies, but are any of them really defending the people. If the Ukrainians themselves don’t know, how can we?
Susanna Peltonen / Translation Tuomo Karvonen
Languages: Ukrainian, Russian, French, English
Subtitles: English
People who came to power / Lyudi, kotorye prishli k vlasti
Rež Oleksiy Radynski, Tomáš Rafa
Ukraine 2015, 17 min
Campfires, tents, barricades, armoured vehicles, masked soldiers, enraged crowds chanting slogans, pictures of the fallen on the walls, coffins being unloaded from a car. The restless camera captures flags, preferably Russian ones or the one of the Donbass People’s Republic, rarely the Ukrainian one (and only on the enemy’s side). People everywhere talk of peace, but the facts say: war. The disturbing snapshot of an anarchic chaos that once wanted to be freedom.
Grit Lemke
- Name in Original Language: Alisa W Krainie Wojny
- Director: Alisa Kovalenko, Liubov Durakova
- Country: Puola
- Year: 2015
- Length: 74 min
- Age limit: null
- Cinematography: Alisa Kovalenko, Liubov Durakova
- Editing: Weronika Pliszka
- Audio: Piotr Pliszka
- Production: Miroslaw Dembinski
Showtimes:
- Cinema Artis, hall 2: Thursday 26.01 - 20:30