WE WILL NOT FADE AWAY (2023). A documentary by Alisa Kovalenko (100 minutes) In Ukrainian, Russian
This film is only available virtually, starting August 1, 2025 (for one month). Access from anywhere in the world.
“We Will Not Fade Away has been extended for one more month. It will be available throughout September 2025!”
This beautifully poetic observational documentary portrays the lives of five teenagers, three boys and two girls, living in the war-torn Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine, who yearn for a different life. “There´s nothing to do here. Nothing to do at all.” They are given the surprising opportunity to hike the Himalayas. We follow them as they prepare for this challenge and travel on this adventure with them. But after this magical escape, they return to Donbas. In 2022, Russia escalates attacks. When Russia invaded, Ukrainian director Kovalenko abandoned the project to join the front lines, only to return to it months later with a renewed sense of its significance. “With film, you can deeply feel the story, and that story goes through you and stays in your heart. Our fight can stay in focus.”
Berlin International Film Festival, Top20 Favorites Hot Docs Toronto
“With its sensitive, unobtrusively perceptive gaze, the film paints a moving portrait of a generation of young people surrounded by darkness, who are nonetheless – or perhaps all the more – able to recognise and celebrate the fragile beauty of life.”
Berlinale Generation
Born in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine in 1987. She studied documentary filmmaking at the Karpenko-Kary University in Kyiv and at the Wajda School in Warsaw, Poland. Her first feature-length documentary Alisa in Warland premiered at IDFA in 2015; Home Games screened at over 100 festivals and won numerous awards. She is the programmer for the international documentary competition of the Molodist film festival in Kyiv. After the start of the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine in February 2022, she broke off her work on My ne zgasnemo and spent four months in a volunteer fighting unit of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. She is working on a feature documentary with footage of the frontline.
Cinematic Spaces of Education Festivalette
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