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“Most of Us Went to the Front for the Sake of our Children’s Future”: Alisa Kovalenko on her CPH:DOX-debuting My Dear Théo
#image_title “Kids and sweet love are the most important thing. And not all this stuff – trenches and war. But if we’re not here there won’t be any kids or sweet love,” a grizzled Ukrainian special forces commander tells one of his charges, a fellow soldier fighting alongside him on the frontline of a seemingly never-ending war. It’s a heartfelt scene made all the more poignant by the identity of the comrade with a camera he’s addressing, a mother named Alisa Kovalenko whose young son Théo has been evacuated to France (along with the filmmaker’s mother and French partner).
My Dear Théo, which premiered last week at CPH:DOX, is made up of little moments like these that add up to a portrait more profound than any battle. It consists of a deft combination of letters Kovalenko penned to her son when not holding a gun, video chats (once Starlink became operable) in which every word the director speaks comes with the knowledge that it might be her last, and on-the-ground footage capturing every aspect of war — insects in the trenches, wandering cows on a bombed farm, a soldier practicing yoga. Every aspect that is, except for the reason they’re there. Which makes sense since Kovalenko has succeeded in her mission to craft something she’d never seen before: a “war documentary narrated from a parent’s perspective.”
A few days prior to the doc’s March 23rd debut, Filmmaker reached out to the award-winning director (2023’s Berlinale-premiering We Will Not Fade Away) and soldier who has not ruled out returning to war.
Filmmaker: In 2014 you were held captive by Russian-back forces near Kramatorsk, an experience you’ve describe as the the most traumatic of your life. But it also prompted you to make a promise to yourself to enlist as a soldier in the event of a full-scale invasion, which you kept (and perhaps will continue to keep in the future). So I’m very curious to hear how working on this film actually affected you personally. Did it serve as a vehicle for healing, for reckoning with trauma? An attempt to reconcile all your competing identities of soldier, filmmaker and mother?
Kovalenko: In fact, it was a very complicated multistage process with different realizations at different steps along the way. This is my first film that was not meant to be a film from the start — it was neither shot nor conceived for this purpose.
From the first days at the front, I did not feel like a director. I didn’t believe that this role could coexist with that of a soldier, and my brain was constantly displacing the director/filmmaker in me. Sometimes I even forced myself to film a little bit, with the feeling that I had to keep something for memory. Cinema just seemed to have lost all meaning, so my camera spent most of its time in my backpack, on sandbags, in dugouts and trenches — lying there, filled with smoke, dust and sand. It was a silent reminder of the past that was quickly receding and being replaced with a new reality. The letters to my son became much more important, deep and existential, something that a camera cannot capture and that I wanted to preserve. These are thoughts, emotions, feelings, memories, dreams and reflections.
This role of director appeared much later, at the editing stage. Until then I didn’t fully believe that a coherent film could be born out of these tiny fragments of the past, letters and fragments of footage. Some kind of an extraction of memory, time, history. It’s a bit of a miracle that it all merged into a film. Only later did I realize the value of what I had managed to preserve. People close to me, my comrades-in-arms, died at the front. They were also parents, their children almost the same age as my son Théo. I thought that maybe this film could become a bridge of memory between us and our children. After all, most of us went to the front for the sake of our children’s future, and it was important for me to leave a trace of that. In the end this film became primarily about the light, tenderness, closeness and love that remains in the heart despite death.
During my first session with editor Kasia Boniecka in the French town of Montsegur, I felt like I just couldn’t work on editing this material. These are the faces of my dear, and now deceased, brothers-in-arms. To think about their death is to experience an indescribable pain that comes up to your throat and chokes you. I couldn’t think about anything else, it was unbearable. It occurred to me that if I didn’t find some method, some way out of these emotions, I would just go crazy from the pain. Nervous, I began thinking that I had to find some life hack urgently, and finally I did. Suddenly, I realized that it’s not just about pain, it’s about the chance to encapsulate that life, that memory. I broke the despair with the belief that we are creating a time capsule in which one can come whenever they like and see all of us alive.
As for my role as a mother, I can say for sure that all the letters I wrote to my son, the videos I shot, and the film that this all translated into, was definitely an attempt to reconcile the identities of soldier and mother, to find this balance of coexistence. After all, it’s one price of life for yourself. But when you are a mother, the price of your life is higher because you also carry in you all that you can give your child in the future — all this love, warmth and support. This is something you are extremely aware of at the front. It’s a terrible realization, but it also gives you a lot of strength. You really want to survive so that this love can continue in your child’s life.
At the beginning, I didn’t think that the process of working on this film could also be healing, therapeutic in a certain sense, because it was very, very painful. I pushed myself to do it because of a sense of responsibility, that I just had to do it. Only now can I say that I have gone through a certain path of healing. In a way, it’s like working with a psychiatrist. At first it’s very hard to get it all out of you, to return to the traumatic events. But over time you get the feeling that you have talked through your pain, lived through it, and it becomes a little lighter. I can’t say that it’s a complete healing, and I don’t know if that will ever come for any of us in Ukraine. We are all traumatized in one way or another. But the war is ongoing, and I think a proper recovery stage is possible only after the war is over, after a fair peace and justice is restored.
Filmmaker: Though My Dear Théo is in many ways the polar opposite of Oleg Sentsov’s Real (2024), which was shot by accident while you intentionally sought to preserve memories for your son, you’re both filmmaker-soldiers who never set out to make your latest films, and who just happened to have brought your cameras along because that’s what you do. In other words, this isn’t conflict zone journalism, per se. Which, ironically, is often more powerful politically. So do you see this love letter to your son, this personal essay, as a contribution to the war effort as well?
Kovalenko: My camera has been with me since the first day of the full-scale war. On the 23rd of February I took a night train to Donbas for the last filming session for my previous feature-length documentary about teenagers in Donbas, We Will Not Fade Away. I spent these first few days with the families of the teenagers very close to the frontline, in a border zone that was very dangerous. And that’s when this transformation took place, when I felt completely powerless as a director. I thought about how to persuade the characters to evacuate, because they did not believe that the territory could be occupied so quickly. And even though I didn’t use my camera, it was with me in my backpack all the time until I went to the front. I just thought that maybe it would be useful there somehow, instead of leaving it at home, where I didn’t know if it would be saved or bombed.
At the front I didn’t film any battles or the most intense moments. The most terrible things you can film are either like the images Oleg Sentsov caught as a soldier with a camera on his helmet, or like Mstyslav Chernov, embedded in an assault brigade with soldiers helping you, when you don’t have to hold a rifle in the other hand. Instead for me, in the most frightening and active moments my camera was either not with me or was switched off. So I mostly filmed these moments of waiting, all the routine, daily, necessary hard work that usually stays behind the scenes. But in fact, this everyday work takes up 80% of the time at the front; it’s something that seems not at all heroic or impressive visually, but without it the front is impossible to navigate.
Similarly, these letters in the film are a way for me to talk about the other side of war, the invisible side. And thus be able to reveal the faces behind the soldiers in helmets. We often see soldiers as some kind of abstract military or heroic warriors, or just anonymous numbers. It was important for me to show that these are just ordinary people who love, dream, fear – to show the simple human fragility. At the front it is all of us, the whole cross-section of our society – fathers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, and mothers.
As for a contribution to the war effort, I really hope that foreign audiences will watch this film and feel closer to us as people, empathize with this tragedy we are going through. It’s much easier for people to associate themselves with the common human things. In this sense, I do hope the film can become a lever in strengthening support for Ukraine. As for what contribution the film can make for us in Ukraine, besides being a testament, a tribute, is slightly more existential. It’s a reminder of our most important values: love, friendship, unity, connections with loved ones. All the beautiful and light things. Sometimes, behind all this grief, pain and loss, our love is filled with bitterness. And I believe that where there is no love and light left – only pain, fear, hatred – something vital for the future also dies. We may fight these feelings somehow, but we cannot build anything further with them.
Filmmaker: Could you talk a bit about wedding the poetic voiceover — really the beating heart of the film — to the images? Did you try to find letters to pair with the events onscreen? Start with the narration and attempt to visualize your words?
Kovalenko: At first I didn’t fully understand how it could all be merged. It was a parallel process for quite some time. Gradually, I began to organize the footage separately, selecting images in order to locate what was most important to me – finding the essence of the visual and atmospheric aspects I captured. Then I started to organize the letters. The texts were a bit chaotic – some very short, just a few sentences, others quite long. I combined them chronologically since it was the most natural way, which ended up being about 20 pages.
During the edit we first watched all the materials with Kasia and then read the letters together. Only then did we start to think about where the letters intersect emotionally with the image, where they intersect chronologically, and where they exist in contrast. We soon realized that because the dramaturgy of the letters was chronological, we had to work with the image chronologically. But what’s interesting is that we started editing the whole film from the end, as we were very clear about how it should conclude emotionally. So we went from end to beginning, which was the most difficult part – just forming all these crucial starting points.
Working with the letters was also quite difficult because there were so many of them, so many important things, and it was very hard to cut them down. I was constantly worried about losing something essential. And working with the text on paper and then turning it into a voiceover for the film – it’s a very different perception. Crafting this coexistence of voice, text meaning and image meant we had to constantly adapt the written word, change it in order to find this delicate, very fragile balance.
Filmmaker: You worked with Simon Lereng Wilmont on the short Girl Away from Home (2023), and both of you have spent your careers focused on the Ukrainian children and adolescents living through war, an endless source of material unfortunately. So why is it so important for you to keep the focus on the young again and again?
Kovalenko: From the moment I had a child my focus really started to change. I shot my second film, Home Games, while I was pregnant and started editing right after giving birth. Even this influenced the final cut of the film, the accents, the meanings. Later, when I was making other films, I looked at everything with this double perspective. I reflected a lot on the younger generation coming up and thought about what we can give them, how we should talk to them, how we can better understand each other. I also started thinking more about the importance of film education for children.
And now I think about it even more, when our world is going crazy and it doesn’t look like we adults will manage to fix it. But it is our responsibility to give them some kind of pillars, something that this new generation can hold onto to resist the tsunami of disinformation, violence, populism and the devaluation of values. To give them filters, tools to protect themselves, and we need to give them the maximum we can right now. Because after us, they will be the ones who will keep this world from collapsing.
I truly believe cinema can be one of the important instruments for this. I’ve recently started thinking about a new documentary project, reflecting on how we can talk to children about the world that has gone mad, and how they can help prevent it from going even further in that direction. I’m pondering a kind of adaptation of Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century for children. Something like “democracy lessons” that avoid boring didactics, and are instead presented with live stories that are cool, fresh, interesting and emotional. It’s still at the idea stage, and I’m in the process of defining the form, but I just feel it’s crucial to put more into the culture of documentary cinema for children.
Filmmaker: Finally, have all the living participants and their families, as well as the families of the deceased, seen the film? Have you screened it for the Ukrainian armed forces? How has everyone responded?
Kovalenko: Not yet, but of course we are planning for it. We’re really hoping for a Ukrainian premiere at Docudays UA in Kyiv, and I hope that some of the film’s protagonists and their families will have the opportunity to come to those screenings. After that we’ll think about screenings in other places where my brothers-and-sisters-in-arms are from. And we also partner with the Children of Heroes charity fund, which helps families that have lost parents and relatives during the war. Together we plan to organize screenings throughout Ukraine for those families.
It was also important for me to show the film to someone very close to me before picture lock, a woman who’d lost her husband in the war, leaving her young daughter without a father. Viktor Onysko was a well-known film editor in Ukraine, and after the start of the full-scale invasion, he went to the front as a soldier. His loss was very painful for all of us in the film community. I thought about this family a lot while making the film. After watching it, his widow wrote to me to say, “I’ve been waiting for a film like this. Thank you for making it.” Those were probably the most meaningful words I could ever hear.
