At the Berlinale, farewell to Donbass and childhood filmed by Alisa Kovalenko

Memories of yesterday’s world. Two teenage girls stroll lazily among the ruins, chaining selfies against a background of twisted metal. They end up sitting on the steps of a disused courthouse, gutted by bombs: “We’re bored… There’s nothing to do here. » The cry of a generation, the anthem of teenagers around the world. Except that here we are “in the asshole of the world, the asshole of Ukraine”, have fun the two girls. They wonder about their future. Leaving, of course. Kyiv? London?

Elsewhere, Andriy dreams while drawing motorcycles. One day he will build his own, but in the meantime he rolls over Soviet antiques, in flip-flops and shorts, in the languor of a Ukrainian summer. From the top of the heaps, he listens to the sound of machine guns. He too thinks about the future. He would see himself as the new Elon Musk, but doubt. “What an engineer am I! »he laments on his return from an expedition to steal electrical cables.

In his documentary We Will Not Fade Away, presented Wednesday, February 22 at the Berlinale, Alisa Kovalenko films the farewell to childhood. A year after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, a dozen Ukrainian films are programmed during the 73e edition of the festival, as well as meetings with the filmmakers who continued to film and testify during the war.

Alisa Kovalenko’s characters live in Zolote-4 and Stanytsia Luhanksa, two villages in the Luhansk region, in the Ukrainian-controlled part of Donbass. They go clubbing, smoke, kiss, paint, recite poems… Since 2014, they live on a frontline. “I remember that year like no othersaid a young girl in tears to her friend. That’s post-traumatic stress. »

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It’s the war before that the young girl is talking about. The director filmed these teenagers from Donbass between 2019 and 2022, on the eve of the Russian invasion. The noise of the bombs is more and more present, the military convoys more and more visible. It’s a speed race. You have to live, quickly, before disaster strikes. The teenagers cling to a crazy hope: to leave for the Himalayas, as promised to them by an adventurer and patron of kyiv. Raising the Ukrainian flag high – higher than the slag heaps blocking the landscape.

Nostalgia and sweetness

The documentary is powerful, the images of Alisa Kovalenko superb with nostalgia and sweetness. They know how to distinguish, behind the lassitude of the black faces and the misery of the interiors, the dark poetry of the Donbass. These are now the images of a submerged world, as fragile and ephemeral as adolescence.

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