Military medics, Yulia «Cuba» and Olexandra «Alaska», share the same dark humour and joie de vivre. Compared by director Yegor Troyankovsky to the heroines of Ridley Scott’s iconic 1991 movie Thelma & Louise, the pair find a space for freedom and fervent, energetic life in the midst of death.
Never far away
Aspiring fashion designer, Yulia picked up her nickname one summer at a pre-war open-air rave, where her dark, tanned skin and dreadlocks gave her an exotic appearance. Her blonde friend Olexandra wisecracks that hers stuck because she is «distant and icy cold.»
The pair are inseparable, Cuba’s cheerful grin the foil to Alaska’s inscrutable visage.
Weaving together selfies, GoPro footage from chest-mounted cameras, and text message conversations, with additional location footage, Troyanovsky teases out the intense sense of camaraderie and protective banter that binds the women together with the small frontline unit to which they are attached.
Russian fire is never far away, with mortar and drones a constant threat. The live footage shot by the two medics can be harrowing, but they joke and smile their way through the explosions, the thick cordite smoke still rising from shell holes as they attend to the wounded.
There is nowhere to look away.
The war up close
This is war up front and close. There is nowhere to look away. One moment the unit is cosy in an abandoned house, the next a drone has hit the roof and discarded ammunition is popping out of the blazing roof.
Alaska dashes back into the burning building to retrieve her medical backpack – full of essential equipment. A second drone strikes and shrapnel tears into her groin. It will be six months before she is walking again, and nearly a year before she returns to the frontlines.
The women dream of returning to their pre-war lives. Cuba’s trip to a Ukrainian Fashion Week in Paris to showcase her futuristic, military-style creations is a final stab at clinging onto the past.
On her return, romance blossoms with a senior NCO (non-commissioned officer) and she soon accepts his marriage proposal. Alaska texts her concern…. Getting involved with a soldier was always considered a step too far.
For a short while, Cuba can luxuriate in joint dreams of a post-war married life, of building a house in the forest… Before the war too takes her love from her, captured in remarkable, pathetically swift and simple footage on a vest-mounted camera.
There are moments of beauty, and moments that are damned in this film, where the Russians are the never-seen death deliverers.
Something good…
The film’s original soundtrack, including songs by well-known contemporary Ukrainian artists such as Serhiy Zhadan, and an original score from composer Frederik van de Moortel, that will linger long after, like its heroines, who crack jokes ’til the end…
I hope we did something good in this life…
…We saved the dog. We can be proud of that.
Do you think we’ll get credit for that in hell?
