The premiere of the film “In Ukraine” took place at the Berlin Film Festival

At the 73rd Berlin Film Festival, the premiere of the documentary film “In Ukraine” by Peter Pavlyus and Tomasz Volskyi took place.

Peter Pavlyus spent two months in Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Kyiv and other cities after the start of the full-scale invasion and filmed how the fighting affected the lives of ordinary people. We see the distribution of humanitarian aid, roadblocks, children playing war, women hiding from shelling in the subway, scorched Russian equipment.

Most of the scenes in the film are destroyed: blown up bridges, devastated residential areas, ruins of administrative buildings, abandoned things in dilapidated houses. Pyotr Pavlyus spent several days at the front near the border with Russia and filmed how soldiers in the forest listened to the sounds of an artillery duel, trying to determine whether a Ukrainian projectile flew by or a Russian one.

“Our film is about how ordinary Ukrainians live after the idiots in Moscow decided to start a war,” says Tomasz Volsky.

The director’s fame was brought to the documentary films “Druhaya strana” (2020), edited from tapes of covert surveillance and eavesdropping preserved in the state security archives of communist times, and “1970” (2021), based on recordings of telephone conversations of Polish officials who led the suppression of popular riots in December 1970 year.

Volsky helped the debutant director Peter Pavlyus to edit the material shot in Ukraine.

“I am very interested in the ordinary in extraordinary circumstances – how people try to adapt and live normally. During the Second World War, they also had to find sustenance and meet friends; people fell in love, children were born. They continue to live because there is nothing else left. It is simply impossible is sitting in his basement. In a sense, it’s sad, because it proves that you can get used to everything. We got used to this war, watching it from afar. So they got used to air raids, sirens, destroyed houses,” he says Tomasz Volsky.

The Berlinale program includes two more documentaries about the war in Ukraine. American actor and director Sean Penn talks about his meetings with Volodymyr Zelensky and other Ukrainian politicians in the film “Superpower”. The premiere of the film “Eastern Front” by Vitaly Mansky and Evgeny Tytarenko is also expected.

On February 24, a demonstration in solidarity with Ukraine will be held on the red carpet at the Festival Palace. It will be attended by the Ambassador of Ukraine to Germany Aleksey Makeev, cinematographers and representatives of the Kyiv and Odessa film festivals.