Alisa Kovalenko

Source: Magali Dougados

Alisa Kovalenko

Ukrainian filmmaker Alisa Kovalenko, whose new film Girl Away From Home (co-directed with Oscar nominated Simon Lereng Wilmont) world premieres at IDFA this week, has revealed further details of her two new projects.

Kovalenko is already at work on what promises to be a harrowing film about Ukrainian women who survived captivity, torture and sexual violence at the hands of Russians from 2014 onward.

“It is a very heavy topic. There are six women…it’s a psychological multi-portrait. All the women want to talk about this. They won’t be silent,” the director said of the project which has the working title Traces.

The film has been supported by SEMA Ukraine, the network of victims and survivors to end wartime sexual violence. It also has support from Denis Mukwege, a Congolese Nobel prize winning doctor who set up a foundation to help survivors of wartime sexual violence.

The film is in early production. A sales agent is yet to be appointed but the Kyiv-based Kovalenko is already planning an impact campaign for the new doc.

Kovalenko’s second new project is a more personal affair.

“At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, I went also to fight. I became a soldier in a volunteer unit,” she explains. During her time at war, she filmed clips and photos for her very young son. ”In case I would die, I wanted to save something from my reality.” She wrote letters to the future and also made a video diary.

This film has the working title, Frontline. This was pitched at IDFA last year and is being produced by Kasia Kuczyńska for Polish outfit Haka Films alongside Danish producer, Monica Hellstrøm, through her new company, Ström Films.

Girl Away From Home, which is a short, screens in IDFA’s Youth Competition. It’s about Nastia, a highly talented teenage gymnast in Kyiv who is forced to go into exile in Germany at the start of the war. Autlook handles world sales.

Kovalenko has another film also screening in IDFA, her feature We Will Not Fade Away which has its Dutch premiere in Best Of Fests, and which world premiered earlier this year in the Generation 14plus strand of the Berlinale. The documentary follows a group of idealistic teenagers in the Donbas region as they plan for an uncertain future. It was produced by Valery Kalmykov for Trueman Production and co-produced by Stephane Siohan for East Roads Films and Kasia Kuczynska for Haka Films.

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