,” which is also building awards buzz on the circuit; Kornii Hrytsiuk’s historical corrective “Eurodonbas,” which examines the region’s true roots; Alisa Kovalenko’s “We Will Not Fade Away,” about Donbas teens who join an adventure mission to the Himalayas; and Mila Teshaieva’s and Marcus Lenz’s “When Spring Came to Bucha,” which respectfully follows a community’s grieving and rebuilding after Russian troops withdraw from a small town near Kyiv in Spring 2022.
“I actually entered Bucha with the Ukrainian military,” said Teshaieva of “Bucha.” “What I saw was a vast landscape of death. I came with a camera and microphone and started filming because I felt it was my duty as a witness. “Now we are avoiding pathetic words like ’our camera is our weapon’; that is in the past,” he continues. “So the fact that this film exists and is telling what happened there, it’s like, zero point, zero, zero zero, one percent of justice.”
Teshaieva is continuing to film people she encountered in Bucha. “Look, we became really close with every person who became a part of our movie, and we’re keeping in close contact with many of them,” she said. “We need to show people in Germany and other countries these stories. It’s revealing how society is changing, and how people are finding or not finding their place in society.”