We Will Not Fade Away (Ukraine, France, Poland; 2023; 100min; Russian, Ukrainian)
Director: Alisa Kovalenko
In this seemingly bleak wartime setting, five teenagers ponder their future. They fully embrace the last golden hours of their childhood with energy, enthusiasm, and hope, despite their circumstances. The members of this imaginative band of dreamers take photographs, paint, and fantasize about becoming actors, or even the next Elon Musk. They rebel, ride waves of adventure, walk into minefields, and sunbathe at a local lake. They dream of escaping not only war, but – like teenagers all over the world –small-town boredom. Will their dream of conquering the world come true when an unexpected opportunity arises that could take them all the way to Nepal?
Alisa Kovalenko
Born in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, in 1987, Alisa Kovalenko studied documentary filmmaking at the Karpenko-Kary University in Kyiv, and at the Wajda School in Warsaw, Poland. Her first feature-length documentary Alisa in Warland premiered at IDFA in 2015. Home Games screened at over 100 festivals and won numerous awards. She is the programmer for the international documentary competition of the Molodist film festival in Kyiv. After the launch of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Alisa left the editing room of We Will Not Fade Away, and joined a volunteer unit of the Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU), where she fought on the frontline in the Kyiv and Kharkiv regions. She fought in the trenches for four months before returning to finish We Will Not Fade Away, which premiered at Berlinale Generation 2023. Meanwhile, as the war in Ukraine continued, Alisa presented a project supported by Chicken & Egg Pictures and Netflix, based on footage filmed during her time in combat, at the IDFA Forum 2022.