Eastern Front
Vitaly Mansky
•
1h 38m
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 Vitaly Mansky
-
Gorbachev. Heaven
Directed by Vitaly Mansky • Documentary • 2021 • 100 minutes
GORBACHEV. HEAVEN finds acclaimed director Vitaly Mansky (UNDER THE SUN) at home with a man who helped to shape the 20th-century: Mikhail Gorbachev.
The Soviet leader was acclaimed as the architect of Glasnost and Perestroika, polici...
-
Putin's Witnesses
Directed by Vitaly Mansky • Documentary • 2018 • 102 minutes
On December 31, 1999, Russian president Boris Yeltsin went on live television just before midnight. He announced he was stepping down, and his chosen successor, Vladimir Putin, would take over as acting president. Putin promised a pres...
-
Under the Sun
Directed by Vitaly Mansky • Documentary • 2015 • 110 minutes
After years of negotiation the Russian director Vitaly Mansky was invited by the North Korean government to make a film about one girl and her family, in the year she prepares to join the Children's Union, on the 'Day of the Shining St...
