In 2019, when the film-maker Alisa Kovalenko began work on a documentary about teenagers in Ukraine’s Donbas region, she hoped to record the hopes and aspirations of a generation growing up with military conflict rumbling in the background.
Three years later, as Kovalenko was finishing the edit of her film, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine changed everything. The lives of all her characters were abruptly altered and her three years of footage turned out to be a document of lives that would never be the same again, on territory now occupied by Russian forces.
