War Mothers

After Stalin ordered the forced collectivization of all the farms in 1930s Ukraine, Maxim, a humble cucumber farmer, rebels. He is arrested by local authorities and shipped off to forced labor camps of SIberia. In a bid to survive and return to his family, he steals away in the dead of night and begins the 1,000km journey home.

When the war came to Ukraine in 2014, 18-year-old Yana Zinkevych watched as her countrymen returned to little or no care, so she set about creating a local chapter of an ancient order of medics. Three years into the conflict, her organisation had grown from a handful of dedicated followers to a battalion of veterans, but early one frosty winter morning, Yana’s life and work came to a crashing halt as she found herself lying in a ditch, with a car bearing down on top of her...