To Die to Live

In 2014, Shakhta, Dancer, and Potter volunteered for the army in order to fight in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict in eastern Ukraine. Although the horrible things they experienced during two years on the front accompany them for every second of their existence, they try to return to civilian life. But the Russian invasion in 2022 forces them to again confront the war. Filmed over the course of twelve years, this documentary uses a fragmentary cinematic language to evoke the trauma experienced by its protagonists, and thus to help us imagine the unimaginable: how to accept that some live while others die, and that – faced with one’s own death – what remains above all is the desire to live.