Ukraine: Focus on Future

The video is made of photographs I found in my relatives’ house in Dnipro, Ukraine.

Zyma, an exhausted Ukrainian soldier, leaves the war and his unit without authorization. He has decided to return home, but the road turns into a space of pressure, where every phone call forces him to justify his choice again and again. His commander, battalion commander, and fellow soldiers try to stop him through fear, threats, a sense of duty, and their shared combat past.

A few years after fleeing Ukraine following the Russian invasion, a boy returns home via a robotic dog, his mechanical avatar, which he controls from his room in Poland. Through this remote presence, he relives memories and reconnects with his past — a connection that now depends on a fragile video stream that could be cut off at any moment.

At 63, Samuel Bayer, the music video director for Nirvana and David Bowie, has seen almost everything. But a chance meeting with the soldiers of the Cultural Forces proves to be a true awakening. Facing his fears head-on, he travels to Ukraine to make a film about the people he has just met. What was planned as a standard documentary shoot will forever transform Bayer’s perspective on the world.

In eastern Ukraine, a group of newly mobilized men arrives at the training grounds of the 225th Assault Regiment. Only weeks earlier, they were living ordinary civilian lives. Now they must learn to carry weapons, move as a unit, obey orders, endure cold, exhaustion, mud, fear, and adapt to the unfamiliar language of war. At first, they are little more than strangers brought together by circumstance.

A grey-haired music teacher from a small, yet picturesque Ukrainian island prepares his tiny brass ensemble for a spring concert with a song called “Draw me the night”. Soldier funerals come to town, turning him into a military conductor. A ferry that carried city residents through the Dniester River is now drawing night after night.