Alisa Kovalenko
Director · Documentary Feature
My motivation for my project “Frontline“
I spent three and a half months at the front. While there, I often said to myself: „I don’t want to shoot this, I want to live it”.
[…] My friend and colleague Marina Stepanska and I were watching my material from the frontline. I used to tell her that I didn’t shoot much, and that what I shot was something unimportant, some leaves in the wind, ants in a trench, soldiers in endless waiting… I could not even think that I had shot a film without realizing it myself. That all this material, this view of the world from a trench – it is special and valuable. I really managed to capture those atmospheres and the state of life at the front. And the death of my friend was also the moment when I realized that I had not filmed it all for nothing. I still have a lot of footage of him standing, silent, laughing, sleeping.
That’s why this project is so important to me, and in fact it’s hard to even define how much it means to me, because it’s also my personal sensual story, and I really want to preserve the memory of it all, to save this space, this time, these states, these faces, these feelings, to rethink this experience, rethink everything that I lived and everything that I managed to leave in the frame.
