Alina Gorlova

The movie is a trilogy that consists of three parts: Human and War (70 mins), Death and Life (70 mins), Space and Time (70 mins). The trilogy observes how war changes humans, space and affects the world.
Through the successive parts, viewers move from the specific to the general, from the human experience of war to the processes of how war influences the whole world.

Each installment explores different phenomena of the war; all three are connected to each other by the common themes of sense, and artistic and visual approaches. The first part, Human and War, investigates the powerful impact of war on personal behavior. The great chaos of war disrupted daily life, but it gradually became a part of people's lives. The war has nevertheless changed their professions, habits, and destinies..

The second part, Death and Life, focuses on the perception of death during the Russian-Ukrainian War. Through the personal stories of several people, we go through the collective experience and acceptance of Ukrainians' common grief. Experiencing the trauma of war together with the heroes of the film, we observe the emergence of a lust for life in its various manifestations.

In the trilogy's final part, Space and Time, we investigate the link between the war in Ukraine and the rest of the world. Events on such a scale affect not only distant countries but also ripple through the past, illuminating hidden and unspoken questions in the history of humanity.

Director Alina Gorlova and colleagues are following the legal proceedings against Russian soldiers who killed and committed different premeditated acts of violence, in order to create a collective portrait of the enemy in contrast to the consequences of this war. The film looks at the personal stories of Ukrainians who have faced uncontrolled hatred in an exploration of the nature of human violence. The filmmakers are seeking to capture the reasons for actions that seem beyond human understanding.

The crew has documented the mass graves and the burials of around 1,000 civilians. Relatives come to the graveyard in search of their loved ones. The bodies of those killed by the occupiers become proof of atrocities, objects of the struggles of those who survived and are striving to commemorate their loved ones, thereby constructing collective memory. The film's dramaturgy is based on the idea that war fades physically but lives on in people's memories. The filmmakers are tracking several war-torn cities and locations, capturing them immediately after hostilities cease and then returning to them later to see how they’ve changed and how spaces recently occupied by war struggle to slowly get back to some kind of peaceful life. It has now become routine to see buildings that would have struck viewers as horrific a few months ago have. Sometimes it’s visible how quickly nature overtakes this rubble and burnt hardware. This story is about the flow of time and the will of life that defeats war and death. While the physical consequences of war change or disappear quickly, they remain in human memory much longer.