When the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, artist and filmmaker Alina Maksimenko was living in a new apartment in Irpin.
“I remember the feeling of something very heavy in the air, when we thought that war was coming,” the director says of the mood before the invasion. In Limbo, her feature documentary about her experiences during the early days of the war, was recently nominated for Best Film and Best Documentary at the European Film Awards. The film is produced by Filip Marczewski and made through Wajda Studio.
Around this time, just before the war started, Maksimenko suffered a freak accident, badly hurting her leg.
“Irpin is very peaceful, a small town with a lot of people, a lot of children, a lot of dogs…it used to be a place for writers,” the filmmaker says of the place she had decided to make her new home. She was on a trip to “buy something small” for the apartment when she fell. She had a lot of keys in her pocket and landed badly on top of them. She ended up in hospital.
Maksimenko has been a successful painter for many years but had also been exploring documentary filmmaking after studying under Marcel Łoziński at the Wajda Film School in Warsaw. She had begun keeping a video diary and tried to keep her small camera with her wherever she went – even when she ended up in hospital.
“When I got to the hospital with a broken leg, on the second day [there] I asked my husband to bring me my small camera and I started to shoot.” Her husband, a musician, made sure she was OK and then flew abroad. He had a concert to attend.
Then the invasion happened.
“I was continuing shooting, having small talks in the corridors [of the hospital]. Later, when I reviewed it [the footage], there wasn’t any amount of tragedy in the conversation,” the filmmaker remembers the strangely cheerful atmosphere in the immediate aftermath of the full-scale invasion.
That atmosphere didn’t last long. It became obvious that patients would have to leave the hospital. The beds would be needed.
Maksimenko also realised that Irpin was close to the front line. She could hardly fail to notice after her apartment was hit in crossfire. “I had some holes in walls, in my bedroom window, in my bathroom, but I fixed everything,” she recalls. “Compared to my neighbours, I was lucky with my home.”
It was time to get out of town. She left Irpin on the 5th March 2022. The very next day, local citizens were killed in the city near to the blown-up bridge.
The artist fled to her parents’ village, not too far from Irpin. They lived in a little wooden house with lots of cats and dogs (who feature prominently in her film). Her father, a retired engineer, was 72. (“He found his inspiration with animals, mainly with cats,” she says of his life after work). Her mother, a musician and music teacher, was 70.
Maksimenko’s initial plan was to convince the parents to leave “and probably move somewhere together.” As the documentary shows, though, they stayed where they were.
The father works hard to protect the cats and dogs and to keep them fed. Even so, one much-loved dog died of a heart attack “Animals, they also experience the same trouble as people,” the director reflects on the toll the war has taken on pets.
When it comes to her documentary work, Maksimenko is able to draw closely on her long experience as an artist. When she was painting, she often used to work outside in the open air, on the street or in the countryside. She has a natural understanding of how to frame a shot. The idea of doing quick sketches, whether with a paintbrush or a camera, comes very easily to her.
“Due to my experience as a painter, I don’t have to think about composition – light, colour…I have it in my head!”
Her family were used to being around cameras. Her grandfather used to shoot home movies. Once she moved in with her parents, she kept her camera close to hand so that she could start shooting whenever she noticed anything worth capturing.
Why the move from fine art to documentary?
As a painter, Maksimenko explains, she felt she had lost her freshness. She was no longer taking the same pleasure in the process. “Probably, my mistake was that I did such a lot of works for exhibition. It became a little bit of a…business,” she remembers. “I lost that feeling of my [artistic] flight.”
Film offered the chance to recharge her creative batteries. She made her first video installation on Kyiv over a decade ago, in 2012. “I got the feeling it was working and it [film] could be part of my language – so I decided to move on.”
She studied under Serhii Bukovskyi in Ukraine and then headed over the border to Poland to the renowned Wajda School in Warsaw. The course was in Polish but she somehow picked up the language. She praises her teacher, Łoziński. “He helped me to understand myself with the camera.”
Her editor on In Limbo, Feliks Mamczur, was part of the same course. They had around 100 hours of material to work with. “We are really patient with each other. We are very, very different but we can bring something good in the artistic meaning to our common work,” the director says of her collaborator.
In Limbo premiered in Visions Du Reel earlier this year to strong reviews and showed later at Millennium Docs Against Gravity in Poland, and then at Doclisboa. “The film is flying quite widely,” its director says with evident understatement.
Maksimenko hasn’t returned to painting. She says she has felt “blocked” since the beginning of the war. “As a painter, I am working with reality…as a painter, I love beautiful things: beautiful light, beautiful streets, I love light in the air. I used to bring beauty into my paintings. But this beauty just became impossible from the beginning of the war.”
She has tried to start painting again but has found “it just doesn’t work.”
Her next project, though. combines both of her skillsets. It’s an animated feature, Snail’s Farm (working title) about a storage facility where people have put away their possessions. An old man visiting the facility finds a box that contains old photos…and a lot of snails. This is all that is left behind after an old farm was destroyed.
“It will take about one year…” she says of when she hopes to complete the new endeavour.
