Directed by Vitaly Mansky and Yevhen Titarenko • Documentary • 2023 • 98 minutes
On February 24, 2022, Yevhen Titarenko didn’t have to puzzle over what he should do. He went to the front. And from the first minute of Russia’s large-scale aggression against Ukraine, he began to record everything that surrounded him: his own feelings when the first rockets began to bomb his city; tens of thousands of refugees in a hurry to leave their homes, creating endless traffic jams at city exits; and the friends with whom he went to war – a war which had progressed to the threshold of his own house in Kyiv.
Yevhen is a member of the volunteer medical battalion ‘The Hospitallers’; created in 2014, it now has more than 1,000 people. The battalion’s mission is to provide first aid on the front line and to evacuate the wounded to headquarters or frontline hospitals.
Each mobile brigade includes an armed driver, an armed guard, and two paramedics. Brigades usually work in pairs of two medical vehicles, thus creating a mobile unit. These people are the main characters of the film. From the first hours of the war, we get as close as possible and spend the first half of the year there.
These six months are full of drama, despair, fear, hatred, bitterness, love, and, most importantly, faith in victory.
Up Next in In the News
-
Red Hollywood
Directed by Thom Andersen & Noel Burch • Documentary • With Billy Woodberry, Paul Jarrico, Alfred Lewis Levitt, Abraham Polonsky, Ayn Rand • 2014 • 118 minutes
A fascinating documentary by Thom Andersen (director of Los Angeles Plays Itself) and Noel Burch (author of To The Distant Observer), Re...
-
Close Relations (Rodnye)
Directed by Vitaly Mansky • Documentary • 2016 • 114 minutes
Following Ukraine’s revolution in 2013, filmmaker Vitaly Mansky decides to travel throughout the region and visit his family. He talks on camera with family members in Ukraine, Crimea and Donetsk, hoping to gain a better understanding ...
-
Watchers of the Sky
Directed by Edet Belzberg • Documentary • With Samantha Power, Benjamin Ferencz, Emmanuel Uwurukundo • 2015 • 121 minutes
With his provocative question, “why is the killing of a million a lesser crime than the killing of an individual?” Raphael Lemkin changed the course of history. An extraordin...
