On November 21, the 21st Travelling Docudays UA opened in the Dnipropetrovsk region. The regional coordinator of the Travelling Festival in Dnipro, Hryhoriy Kurachytskyi, announced the beginning of the program, which lasted until November 28. The festival was held in a combined format, both offline and online. The 21st Travelling Festival in Dnipro took place at five locations. The online event featured filmmaker Alisa Kovalenko and partners from the Odesa region, specifically from the city of Chornomorsk, including regional coordinator Oleh Ohredko.

At the opening, the film Girl Away From Home, directed by Ukrainian director Alisa Kovalenko and Danish director Simon Lereng Wilmont, was presented. This film tells the story of a young gymnast from Kyiv who was forced to leave for Germany due to the Russian invasion and build her new life in an unfamiliar environment.

After the screening, the audience from Dnipro and Chornomorsk engaged in a Q&A session with the director, vividly asking questions about the film’s concept and the filmmaking process. The audience was particularly interested in the fate of the girl and the reasons why she was chosen as protagonist. They were also curious about how the director knew there would be a war, considering the events of the film began before the full-scale invasion.

For many years, Hryhoriy Kurachytskyi, regional coordinator of the Travelling Docudays UA in the Donetsk region and moderator of the Docudays UA film club at the NGO “Pryazovska Human Rights Group,” has been holding screenings and educational events in Mariupol. In March 2022, following the start of the full-scale invasion, Hryhoriy was forced to leave the city and eventually continued his activities in Dnipro, gathering displaced people from Mariupol around him. Around the same time, on March 16, 2022, Russian troops destroyed the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater by dropping a high-powered bomb on it while hundreds of residents were hiding in the theater's bomb shelter. This event became one of the most devastating not only for the people of Mariupol but also for the whole of Ukraine and was widely publicized worldwide.

As part of the 21st Travelling Docudays UA, the Central City Library in Dnipro hosted the first presentation of a model replica of the Drama Theater that once stood in Mariupol, along with the film program. The history of the theater was recounted by Viktoriya Lisohor, head of the Mariupol library system. Olha Demidko, theater specialist and associate professor of cultural studies at Mariupol State University, joined the meeting online. She discussed the process of creating this model, emphasizing that it is an exact copy of the theater, reduced by 150 times. 

It has been over 1,000 days since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The tragedies of this war are countless, yet Ukrainians both within the country and abroad are learning to commemorate the Ukrainian cultural monuments destroyed by Russia, as well as the lives lost under the rubble as a result of shellings.

Further information about these events can be found on the Travelling Docudays UA page for the Donetsk region, on the main Travelling Docudays UA Facebook page, as well as on the official festival website.

The regional partner of the Travelling Docudays UA in the Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk regions is the NGO “Pryazovska Human Rights Group.”

Title photo: a still from the film Girl Away From Home.

The 21st Travelling Docudays UA is supported by the Embassy of Sweden in Ukraine, the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ukraine, and International Media Support. The opinions, conclusions or recommendations do not necessarily reflect the views of respective governments or charitable organizations of these countries. The author(s) of this publication are solely responsible for its content.