Oleksandr Tkachenko: Where Everything Disappears

The protagonist of this excellent Ukrainian documentary film, which took two awards at the DocuDays 2026 in Kyiv (The jury’s Special Mention in the DOCU/UKRAINE competition, and the Audience Award) is Dmytro Dokunov, who filmed everything, it is his own experience, whereas Oleksandr Tkachenko did the editing and production, “shaping my footage into its final form”, as Dmytro wrote to me.

I write about him with his first name as I feel I know him after 89 minutes on the screen, going with him from (his description) “our own eco-village, an ecological yoga community”, that he is building with friends and his love Daria, who plays a crucial role in the film, when he visits her having gone to war for his country.

From Paradise in the beginning when he and other men in his unit are training in a camp in the UK – to Hell, when the training becomes reality and we follow him in the battle zone into more and more painful moments… Dmytro, introduced as a man, who believes in art and peace, faces the horror of war, gets injured and stays at hospital and at home for some time, only to return to the war being “upgraded” to be a commander.

This is where the pain becomes unbearable for Dmytro, and for the spectator, Me. He sends 6 of his men out to check a position – they don´t come back. Guilt he says, it will stay with me forever. Dmytro himself is hurt seriously, he is hospitalized, he has to learn to walk, he takes drugs, “I am a dreamer”, he goes back to the ecological yoga community, which is not the same as before. And this young charismatic man is not the same as before. He suffers not only physically…

It is very seldom you get that close to a protagonist in a film that is so well edited, using a lot of split screen, a lot of warm and playful sequences with his pals in the units… but when you watch the credits after the film you get the evidence of the amount of victims this insane war has. Butcha, Kherson, Kramatorsk…

Ukraine, Germany, France 89 mins.