War destroys people from the inside, as well as simply killing them from external sources – shells, missiles, bullets and fire – #Anna Kurkurina#, the world champion Ukrainian athlete and trainer, remarks in Everything Needs to Live. This sensitive and moving portrayal of her work to save the animals and people broken by the Russian invasion shows her singular commitment to overcoming hopelessness.
New resilience
The #war in Ukraine has spawned scores of documentaries about its impact on the country and its people. In Everything Needs to Live, Tetiana Dorodnitsyna and Andrii Lytvynenko find a new way to reveal the resilience of people living under the daily threat of death from an advancing foreign army.
Playing late April in its German premiere at Wiesbaden’s #goEast film festival, the film focuses on the life of Anna Kurkurina, a world champion female athlete whose own sense of difference – she identifies as a lesbian woman – has informed her life since an early age. Driven by compassion for animals since childhood, she left teaching, a career she had been pushed into in Soviet times, to devote herself to sport when she was 40 years old. Now 56, living alone with a host of stray cats and dogs she has rescued, she devotes all her spare time to caring for the pets – and people – devastated by Russia’s war on Ukraine.
But beneath the exterior, she feels the pain of all living things struggling to survive as death rains down from the sky.
Anna’s gender may not always be immediately obvious to those who don’t know her (in one scene where she is treated in hospital for an infected leg, she is initially addressed as ‘Sir’), but within her community in #Mykolaiv, a frontline city in south-eastern Ukraine, she is a celebrity and firmly part of the place’s fabric.
When not teaching fitness and sports classes or coaching young weightlifters, including Dima, a young man with #cerebral palsy#, Anna runs a sophisticated animal rescue and support operation. Coordinating shipments of 1,400 kilograms of humanitarian aid for the domestic animals left abandoned by war is just one of her jobs. She’s not afraid to get her hands dirty – swimming through floodwaters after the Russians blow up a vital dam – to rescue helpless cats and dogs or driving to within a couple of kilometres of the Russian trenches to follow a tip-off about two wounded dogs.
The broken and burdened
Small, compact and muscular, Anna seems tireless and tough. But beneath the exterior, she feels the pain of all living things struggling to survive as death rains down from the sky. There is a gentleness behind the gruff exterior, a deeply spiritual side to her nature that drives her to live the compassion she feels in her heart.
This is an unusual take on the war in Ukraine. A film about a woman who takes those broken and burdened under her care, even as she feels broken and burdened within. It is a story of the strength that springs from adversity, from a woman who is determined to live according to her values, come what may.
