Alisa Kovalenko is a mother and a filmmaker who also became a soldier in early 2022 after the full-scale Russian invasion of her country in 2022. For Kovalenko and her fellow Ukrainians, repelling the aggressor from the East and protecting their homeland became the sole raison d’être. And with that came terrible choices and enormous sacrifices. She gave up her career, but she also had to leave her 4-year old son behind.
“I felt that I cannot make cinema [anymore] and I didn’t see any sense in it. I died for myself as a director. And that’s how also I decided to fight as a soldier, because I thought it was the only way to stop Russians from destroying and occupying our country. I felt that if we parents will not go to fight now, then our children will have to do it in 5, 10, 15 years,” she tells BDE.
“But while I was on the front line, I also felt that it’s important to save memories for my son because I didn’t know when or if I will see him again. So I started to write letters for him in the future and also film, little by little, some small fragments of our life on the frontline.”
When Kovalenko later assessed the material she prepared for her son, she realised that she was telling a story of war from a unique perspective, but not one that entailed continuous engagement.
“War is also endless waiting, routine boredom, looking at the same field, but what’s happening in your mind and what you’re thinking about during these days and nights in the trenches, I saw that it was not captured in any films, and I wanted to find these two sides of emotional ties and fragments of reality around us in the routine small talks with my comrades,” she says.
“But this film will become also [a] branch of memory between parents and children, because I was trying to explain complicated existential things for my son because I thought it’ll be more for him in the future when he grows up…When I left him, he was not even five years old.”
“Also it’s a woman’s point of view and also a mother’s point of view [and shows the] complexity of these different perspectives on the frontline,” Kovalenko adds.
The project is produced by Kasia Kuczynska of Polish outfit Haka Films, who was co-producer on Kovalenko’s multi award-winning We Will Not Fade Away, which the director eventually left the trenches to complete and present in 2023. The film is about five kids from Donbass who are transported briefly out of the war zone to the bliss of the Himalayas.
“It’s very cinematic,” Kuczynska says of Kovalenko’s Frontline. “There is also a lot of very rough life on the frontline, which is being surrounded by explosions all the time. But it’s not like the explosions in Saving Private Ryan, it’s something far away or a missile just flying above your head that is creating constant tension and a constant feeling of danger that will be very, very much experienced by the viewer. It is a very up-close look at what is the real life of the soldiers on the frontline.”
“This film is not about geopolitics, it’s strictly about those people on the frontline. It’s Alisa’s personal story. There are her comrades that we can observe and listen to them, and listen to what they are missing, how they are trying to maintain closeness with their families, contacting them, talking to their children. So this is the closest we can get to the soldiers and their everyday life on the frontline.”
After the world premiere of We Will Not Fade Away at Berlinale, Kovalenko visited many international festivals with the film. Was this a welcome distraction or a burden, given how her thoughts, when away, were inevitably trained on Ukraine? She answers that her engagement at international events was less about promoting her own film, and more about generating support for Ukraine in the war against Russia.
“We take it as a second job to do this culture diplomacy,” she says. “I see this as a mission more than [film promotion] because I cannot think anymore in the same system, like it was before, or about success.” She adds that she is happy to do it “if it’ll help us to win this war, if it’ll stop the deaths of my friends.”
Frontline has a running time 90 minutes and an expected release date of January 2025. Backers include US outfit Chicken and Egg. At Cannes Docs, producer Kuczynska is looking for festivals, sales agents, buyers and gap financing. “We have a co-producer, Monica Hellström from Denmark, and we would like to attach a Ukrainian co-producer as well because it’s important symbolically to have a Ukrainian partner on board,” she says. The team is hopeful that monies will be forthcoming from the Polish and Danish Film Institutes. Last week-end the project won the Soundmind Post-production Prize at Millennium Docs Against Gravity.
“It is really important to listen to what Alisa has to say and what those men on the frontline have to have to say because we don’t think enough of…the people who are there to do what they do, their isolation from their families and the constant tension and fear that they live with,” says Kuczynska. “I think that we focus on numbers and we focus on the geopolitical game and we really forget about the people who are there, and the cost that they are paying for, as in Alisa’s case, protecting their country. I think that it is incredibly crucial for this kind of film to happen.”
