This week Geneva-based FIFDH Impact Days presented a particularly poignant case study which revolved around the Ukrainian project Peace for Nina and which saw the participation of the project’s director and producer, Ukraine’s Zhanna Maksymenko-Dovhych, and Swiss-Albanian filmmaker Dea Gjinovici, who is also producing.
Peace for Nina won the FIFDH Impact Days Award (worth €15,000) last year, and Gjinovici said the prize gifted the team with “a really big momentum,” pushing them to strategise their efforts in a more targeted, flexible fashion.
After introducing the third member of the production team, producer Lyuba Knorozok (who was not in attendance), Maksymenko-Dovhych spoke about how her life had changed already after Euromaidan, when Russia annexed Crimea and partly occupied the Donetsk and Lugansk regions.
Already back then, many Ukrainians joined the army, including the son of Nina (the documentary’s protagonist) who began serving his country in summer 2014. After the explosion at Donetsk airport on 19 January 2015, Nina’s son disappeared. The director started searching for him along with other friend and volunteers. The man was also the cousin of Maksymenko-Dovhych’s husband. They later found out that he was killed by Russian warlord Arsen Pavlov. It took two and a half months to find the body of her son. Maksymenko-Dovhych began shooting on the day of the burial, even though she wasn’t planning to make a film, but more of a “war chronicle.”
Maksymenko-Dovhych praised Nina’s great courage and stressed how she wasn’t just grieving as a mother but seeking for justice. She began collecting evidence by herself and a noted Ukrainian lawyer joined the legal battle to have her son’s murder recognised as a war crime by Ukrainian and international courts. As in many other cases, the perpetrators are not alive anymore, but they are still not recognised as war criminals.
Before the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the team’s main goal was to spread knowledge around war crimes committed in Ukraine, but now it has shifted to speeding up the lengthy court proceedings and prosecuting the perpetrators effectively.
The team is also partnering with the Centre for Civil Liberties, which was awarded with both the Nobel Prize and the Right Livelihood Award last year. During her contribution, Oleksandra Matviichuk of the Centre for Civil Liberties, said: “Russia did not start this war against Ukraine in February 2022, but in February 2014. That’s why we’ve been documenting war crimes for nine years already, and this film shows the real story of a war crime which was committed before the large-scale invasion. This is also the story of a mother fighting for justice, and there will no sustainable peace without justice in a region where Russia, for decades, used the war to achieve their geopolitical interests and used war crimes as a method to win this war.”
According to figures collected between 2014 and 2020, more than 20,000 war crimes were committed in Ukraine, including 108 cases of murders of captives. Of these, 50 victims were civilians and 58 were military. Moreover, 78 were extrajudicial executions, 24 people were tortured to death, and six were drowned. Until 24 February 2022, the law enforcement agencies of Ukraine registered 397 criminal proceedings under Article 438 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.
Gjinovici commented how the project aims to change the international war justice landscape. For a long time, victims went through the ICC, in the hope of setting up special tribunals, a process which has proven lengthy and ineffective especially in identifying the “mid-perpetrators.” She mentioned how the Kosovo tribunal, for example, managed to prosecute in less than 2% of the war crimes.
Between 2022 and 2023, crimes of aggression and war crimes have soared to 73,502, with 642 suspects among military officials, politicians and propagandists. In a recorded message, TRIAL’s Senior Legal Advisor Elsa Taquet underscored how focusing on “local-led justice” is key as well as to elaborate procedures to classify large evidence and to “prioritise it.”
Over the last year, the production team of Peace for Nina partnered with both TRIAL and Think Film. The latter helped them “to devise an entire campaign roadmap” in Ukraine and internationally. They kept pitching the project at different festivals and industry gatherings. “The main idea is that we shouldn’t separate our production [process] from our impact,” said Gjinovici, adding how both aspects are set to affect the project’s development and its release strategies. Their first impact event already took place in Kosovo, and new partners such as Swiss Films and a sales agent were found along the way.
