Two young Ukrainian women. One 31 and a lawyer, the other 21 and a psychology student. What did they do when Russia invaded their country in February 2022? The five part series My generation @ war (AVROTROS) kicked off the first episode about young Ukrainians in wartime on Wednesday, entitled ‘Fight or flight’. That sounds like there was something to choose from. But in the conversations with these women, it seems more like circumstances dictated who fought and who fled.
Olha Bihar (31) was born in Kramatorsk, Donetsk region. We see her sitting in full battle gear in a destroyed building. Lips painted, nails painted, and if I’m not mistaken here and there a pinch of something. For her, the war started in 2014, she says, when Russians wanted to annex the part of Ukraine where she lived. Since the Russian invasion, she has been the first lieutenant in command of a mortar battalion. How she came to be, is not explained by makers Simone Timmer and Roel van Hees.
We see Olha fiddling with weapons, we see her instructing men for an exercise. She has killed enemies and lost friends in battle, she says. She herself is willing to give her life, even though she has a son. Her life resembles that of a “hero in a war movie,” she says, and for me she remained that way, a character. A heroine that I believed, but did not understand.
For student Taisiia Kosenok from Kyiv, the first explosions were less violent than she knew from movies. “In reality it is a lot of noise. Less dramatic.” Her university offered her the opportunity to complete her studies in the Netherlands. Is that a choice or an opportunity? A decision or a way out? And when she left Kyiv, was it running or leaving? In Amsterdam she is safe, but lonely. Consumed with guilt, because they not to fight well lives. In a online interview says Taisiia that she “is not looking forward to living anymore at the moment”. She traveled with as an interpreter and translator One today to war zones in Ukraine. Since then, the war she left behind lives even more for her. Maybe it doesn’t even matter that much if you fight or flee, in both cases it will cost you your life.
A spider and a snail
The lives of filmmaker couple Peter and Petra Lataster-Czisch came to a standstill in corona time. And they started filming that world that had become small and produced the almost two-hour documentary Travel through our world on. (KRO-NCRV). They film neighbours, animals and themselves. We see a caterpillar dangling from a silk thread, a spider perfecting its web, a snail toiling over a leaf. And we keep that pace.
We see the couple, often in bathrobes, rummaging through the house. He drops her eyes before going to sleep, she cuts his nails. The neighbors bring groceries. There is video calling, working from home and spending time. The outside world does not extend beyond the garden with the neighbors within earshot. A neighbor is sitting in front of a computer teaching topography. The Ukrainian upstairs neighbors are concerned about a couple of crows who have been violently chased out of their nest by a magpie. What goes on outside that bubble of the inner garden, we hear through news readers, the press conferences of the Prime Minister and in telephone conversations.
In one go I was completely back in time that seems like a long time ago, but it wasn’t so long ago that I can look at it from some distance. Beautiful time capsule, but not yet for me. Lieutenant Olha Bihar predicted in My generation @ war that in twenty or thirty years time books and films will definitely be written about her generation of Ukrainians. I think I can handle a corona film by then.