I\u2019m trying to promote what is left of our scattered body of culture, and I\u2019m trying to build lifelines from abroad to Ukraine.<\/p><\/div><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
\u201c\u0412\u0442\u043e\u0440\u0433\u043d\u0435\u043d\u043d\u044f\u201d \u2013 INVASION<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Darya, 29, was not quite expecting a full-on invasion by Vladimir Putin and Russia in February 2022. She was working for a film festival in Kyiv, set for that March, and looking forward to an April trip to Iceland with Sasha, her boyfriend with whom she lives, and her childhood best friend. In early 2022, she had been hearing reports from her Western friends that an invasion was imminent. But inside Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky had downplayed the threat of Russia charging into the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then came the morning of Feb. 24. Darya and Sasha were awakened by a phone call from his sister in Zaporizhzhia, informing them that Kyiv was being bombed. They walked out onto their apartment\u2019s balcony overlooking central Kyiv and heard the aerial assault. \u201cWe saw smoke,\u201d she says, \u201cso we knew it was on.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The couple spent the next few hours throwing clothes and food in backpacks and waiting in long ATM lines. They met up with her younger cousin, whom she calls \u201ca brother,\u201d and set out to meet friends in Brovary, a little east of Kyiv. From there, they decided to escape to western Ukraine on a 400-mile trip to Drohobych. With GPS out, Darya relied on Telegram, a messenger app people were using to communicate, to find the safest routes. \u201cYou don\u2019t know where the next bomb is going to land,\u201d she says. \u201cWe had to choose the road to take, and one of them was where a burning plane was going down, and another one was right next to the airport that was probably going to be targeted, too.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n We had to choose the road to take, and one of them was where a burning plane was going down, and another was right next to the airport that was probably going to be\u00a0targeted, too.<\/p><\/div><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n What should have been an eight-and-a-half-hour trip took three days to make it to Drohobych, where they stayed with a friend\u2019s parents. Darya remembers a moment of paralysis staying in a house outside of Kyiv at the start of the journey, freezing up for 10 minutes and not wanting to get in the shower for fear of not being able to get dressed if a bomb hit while she bathed. She remembers Sasha\u2019s father, a Ukrainian expatriate who had spent the last nine years living in Russia, texting them congratulations for being \u201cliberated.\u201d (It\u2019s a misguided sentiment, Darya says, prevalent among some Russian citizens and sympathizers that Russia was liberating Ukraine from fascists.) And she remembers trying to convince her mother in Zaporizhzhia, close to the fighting in the east, to escape west with her. But her mother is a doctor who immediately went to work caring for injured and sick children. And she also was taking care of Darya\u2019s grandmother, who has Alzheimer\u2019s, so evacuation wasn\u2019t an option. \u201cI wasn\u2019t sure I\u2019m going to see her again,\u201d Darya says, \u201cand there was a lot of heartfelt phone calls, and you\u2019re crying your eyes out because you don\u2019t know. Is it going to be the last conversation?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c\u0421\u0442\u0456\u0439\u043a\u0456\u0441\u0442\u044c\u201d\u2013 RESILIENCE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Once settled in Drohobych, Darya began helping others who wanted to evacuate. She took stock of her connections across Europe, finding friends who could welcome anyone she knew wanting exodus. That remains one of the major crises of the conflict in Ukraine, with close to 6.3 million Ukrainians having left everything behind in their home country, according to the latest data from the United Nations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Darya also geared up to fight what she describes as the Russian propaganda machine coming out of Moscow. A student of languages, she is fluent in English, German, French and Spanish, and can hold her own reading Polish and Italian. She has a college degree in foreign languages and got her first English lessons from bootleg VHS copies of American films overdubbed in Ukrainian. \u201cWhen I was watching Lion King<\/em> growing up,\u201d she says, \u201cI could hear the original English language and the original songs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n So Darya joined up with members of an organization associated with the U.S. Agency for International Development to translate firsthand reports of what was happening on the ground in Ukraine and disseminate them to embassies and news agencies. For instance, when Russia bombed a Mariupol maternity hospital in March 2022, Darya says news stories started appearing featuring a Ukrainian beauty blogger standing in front of the bombed hospital. Russia then denied the validity of the story, claiming the blogger was an actress. Darya and others were translating the transcripts sent by Ukrainian soldiers who were in Mariupol and then got them to the organization that dispersed them to media outlets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Darya says that any time she translates, it\u2019s \u201can act of resilience,\u201d something she can do to fill words with power and truth in \u201cdifferent languages so people can read it and have something to counter the giant mass of propaganda Russia pumps out every day.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c\u041f\u043e\u0432\u0435\u0440\u043d\u0435\u043d\u043d\u044f\u201d\u2013 RETURN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Darya and Sasha returned to Kyiv in May 2022. The city felt different. A number of their friends were on the front lines fighting in the east. There were no sounds of children. No cars, which also meant no traffic and pollution. She says for the first time in her city, she could hear the birds and see the stars through a clear night sky. But a jarring sound blared a new reality across Kyiv. \u201cIt felt very much unsafe,\u201d she says. \u201cWhen you hear the air raid every day, you need to know where the nearest shelter is.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It felt very much unsafe. When you hear the air raid every day, you need to know where the nearest shelter is.<\/p><\/div><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Once back in Kyiv, Darya was ready to jump back into her work as a program coordinator and curator with the Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, an annual festival based in Kyiv that holds competitions for short and full-length documentaries from around the world about human rights issues. Docudays had canceled its planned festival earlier in March, but by that fall, people started reaching out wanting to find some way to gather to watch movies. So Darya and others with the festival organized an event for a weekend November 2022. They showed films in Kyiv. People came, and Docudays sent the movies out on Zoom for those who couldn\u2019t make it. They even secured a generator in case there was a blackout. All told, 22,000 people attended in person and online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Darya is proud of Ukraine\u2019s rich film history, dating back to the country\u2019s first national film production cooperative in the 1920s. She\u2019s quick with a crash course on Ukrainian directors, citing the documentaries of Dziga Vertov in the 1930s, the poetic vision of Sergei Parajanov, an director of Armenian descent who became a leader in Ukrainian cinema in the 1960s, and the work of Oleksandr Dovzhenko, whom she calls \u201cthe biggest name of early Ukrainian film\u201d and whose early silent films are celebrated by international critics today. With that history as a backdrop, it doesn\u2019t surprise Darya that several other film festivals across Ukraine showed movies in the midst of war. She says there were film screenings in cities around Ukraine in ground-level places that were the safest, like schools and metro stations. \u201cPeople still wanted to get together and feel the community,\u201d she says, \u201cand the war really mobilized Ukrainian society as a group that wants to create something together.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n People still wanted to get together and feel the community, and the war really mobilized Ukrainian society as a group that wants to create something together.<\/p><\/div><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n That want went global. AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, where Darya interned during a summer while at NC State, reached out to her for suggestions of Ukrainian titles to feature at a showcase near Washington, D.C., as donations came in there. She worked with a visual arts organization in her hometown of Zaporizhzhia to establish a residency for Ukrainian artists in Germany. She also worked to get an art installation in the city. And she\u2019s currently working on a project that will enable Ukrainian animators to have small residencies in Germany.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All of this falls under her self-assigned job description of \u201cpreserving Ukraine\u2019s creative economy\u201d during war. \u201cI\u2019m trying to secure alternate ways for people to hear our stories,\u201d she says, \u201cand also for our film industry to survive because right now, not many films are being made, but the film professionals can show their previous work, get new connections and work on their next projects.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/magazine.ncsu.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/Darya_plane1_RGB.jpg\")
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