Maryna Stepanska

Maryna Stepanska’s upcoming work is a non-fiction book about the experience of garden therapy during the war and the role of gardens in Ukraine throughout history.

Stepanska’s personal experience is based on the time she spent in the first five years of her life with her grandmother, who was not only a keen gardener but also a herbalist. A village teacher who had lived there her entire life; she knew the flora intimately and had a very close relationship with it. She collected herbs and introduced the young Stepanska to the beauty of the world of botany. When Stepanska moved to Kyiv at the age of five, she gradually forgot about this world. But during the first year of the full-scale invasion and after losing her mother and sister, this “lost paradise” called her back, and she began gardening herself.

The book will be a mix of Stepanska’s personal experiences, the results of research into gardens and their owners in Ukraine over the past century, as well as the stories of people who tend gardens in war zones.

After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the lives of Ukrainian filmmakers changed dramatically. The film follows several characters who made their choices under new life-threatening circumstances. Alisa Kovalenko, film director, voluntarily went to the frontline, leaving her little son and husband back home. After five years in a Russian prison, Oleg Sentsov, a film director, goes to the frontline, putting his career on hold. Cinematographers Serhiy Mykhalchuk and Yuriy Gruzinov, and producer Volodymyr Yatsenko started to document war crimes from the first day of the invasion. Roman Liubiy, film director, started volunteering and then decided to train as a sniper. The family of cinematographers Elena Chekhovskaya and Mykhail Markov survived the occupation in Irpin, escaped, and then returned to a destroyed house with their children. Yaroslav Pilunski, a cinematographer, became an air intelligence officer, leaving behind his projects. “It was this moment that made me want to take up the camera again,” says Maryna. “To capture all of us in this new reality, although it seems difficult to imagine the shape of this future film. We are all a work in progress now. When the current circumstances end, an unfinished product will take on a new shape.”