Rising Is a
State of Mind

Director's statement

Until 2022, I was busy telling other people's worst stories. I have worked in conflict zones like Chechnya, Syria, Congo, Palestine. I knew how to arrive in a country at war and hide behind my role of a tough war reporter, always able to deliver in any circumstances. But then the country of my mother decided to erase the country of my father from the face of the Earth, and I no longer knew how to do that.

To say I didn't see it coming after fifteen years of reporting in Chechnya would be a lie. I know all too well how the Russian war machine works. But it scared me that I never thought of preparing for the war becoming personal. It scared me that I saw something like the Bucha massacre in a nightmare, days before it happened in real life. It scared me that I shared blood, roots, friends and one of my citizenships with these butchers. Half-perpetrator, half-victim, I was in a very peculiar position, which did not allow me to hide behind the “neutral observer” role anymore. I chose the side of history I considered right.

Russia was done with me anyway, too. I was one of those “traitors of the Motherland” in the numerous lists circulating online. I was also French “with origins and a little charming accent” (read: we will never accept you fully). It struck me one day: I must recover and transmit the story of my ancestors. My Russian grandmother did her best to hide my Ukrainian identity from me. To prevent me from feeling Ukrainian, speaking Ukrainian and knowing my roots. I had to reclaim that part of me before it was too late.

Because Russia's plan was clear: to destroy not just homes and power plants, but also anything that made Ukrainians able to prove they were a nation entirely different from Russia. Books. Museums. Archives. Identity.

During my darkest moments, I spent sleepless nights scanning digitised Ukrainian archives online for the trace of my ancestors, blasting Amor Mundi by Anni Pohto on repeat. “I am a white monkey, who escaped Tchernobyl...”, I sang along.

And then Anni herself called and asked me if I would host her concert in my home. She had her own motivation: to build a real offline community around her music across Europe for her upcoming album. But for me this offer had a larger-than-life symbolic meaning. In the Soviet Union, where any free thought was forbidden, home concerts were places of ultimate creativity.

So I said yes. She came, and between songs she spoke about how, having been born on opposite sides of a now closed border, our friendship should not exist. And how her grandfather Antti fought Russia and she grew up learning to always be prepared for war.

Next morning I asked her if she wanted to play home concerts across the European train lines connecting Europe to Ukraine. To my surprise, she said yes. This is how this film came to be.

Two women journey by train, breaking the cliché of the travel movie genre often featuring male buddies on a quest.

The meeting with my uncle in Kyiv filled me with shame that I didn't come to ask earlier, but also with solace that I arrived on time, and that the history of my grandfather who was in the Gulag, and my grandmother who was dispossessed, and who met in the Pentecostal church at a time when religion was forbidden, will not be lost now no matter how many bombs Russia continues to drop.

Seeing all my relatives, whom I resemble a lot, and understanding that none of them left the country at war made me understand myself better. And where I must put this inherited Ukrainian state of mind and fearlessness at work.

Taking upon Anni's stubborn quest for hope in the war-torn world, this film looks beyond the conflict and towards hope, one that helps us project into the Sunday after the war instead of making yet another unwatchable documentary of horrors that makes people turn away from the screens they love so much these days. An ode to a Europe of diverse identities, all worth defending in the face of the Russian threat.

This film is how I fight it, without weapons. A piano and a camera.

— Olga Kravets, director