In Yeva Strelnikova’s thriller Stay Online [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Yeva Strelnikova
scheda film], which won the New Flesh Competition for Best First Feature at Fantasia, Katya (Liza Zaitseva) is a volunteer from Kyiv, trying her best to fight against the Russian invasion. She is using a laptop donated to the resistance, when its owner’s son suddenly contacts her. Apparently, his parents are missing.

Cineuropa: We have got used to documentaries depicting the ongoing war, but you are showing it from a whole different side: via screens. Why did you want to do this?
Yeva Strelnikova: The entire war has already been captured online: these bloody, horror-like photos and videos have flooded the whole internet. There are more and more coming in every single day. This war will always be known as this bloody massacre. Still, we wanted to tell this story privately, through one family, one flat and one laptop. We wanted to make viewers feel like they were right there, together with the main character, and feel everything in the present, not in the past.

Butterfly Vision [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Maksym Nakonechnyi
scheda film] also played with technology a little. I guess this is how we experience life these days, and conflicts, but was it a challenge for you to make it watchable in the film?
I haven’t seen that movie yet, but ours was definitely a challenge in terms of technology. We were doing it for the very first time, and we did it intuitively because the format was unknown to us. That’s how we live in Ukraine. We made lots of mistakes and lots of bad decisions while in production. But we finally reached our destination, and now, we want to proudly show this film to the world.

What about the scene with the Russian mother? It’s very interesting that you decided to show someone who does not agree with the regime.
We do understand that there are Russians who are against the war. There are those who support it, too, but if it were to affect their personal lives, they could easily be against it. Why? Because they are human beings, and they are afraid of being a victim. It doesn’t make them “good Russians”, though.

Your protagonist is stuck in one place, and yet you had to make sure that the film would be engaging, or nerve-wracking even. How did you talk about this role with your actress? All she has here is her face.
We talked about it and worked hard on her performance, but you need to understand that our emotional state at that time was very close to Katya’s. We shared so many feelings and emotions about what was happening; we remembered how we felt on the very first day of the full-scale invasion.

It was a challenge to work on this project in general. At that time, none of the Ukrainians were too stable, emotionally. We shot everything in chronological order, so Liza could follow Katya scene by scene, immersing herself more and more in the story. Just like that character, really. The most difficult part happened at the end of the shoot, because Liza was actually pregnant. By the end of the film, when we shot all of those emotionally draining scenes, she was in her eighth month.

You offer some hope here, but you are also quite realistic – after all, people die every day. What was your goal?
Our main goal was to show an ordinary person who can still find the strength to remain human during an unjust, sadistic war. Someone who will fight till the end. I didn’t set out to shock anyone. I wanted to immerse the viewer not so much in the actual events, but in the people experiencing them. And I wanted to do it without telling lies, while being as honest and realistic as possible. Because the Ukrainians who are still living in such circumstances would immediately notice the lie. The world needs to see our reality, and if it shocks people, then maybe they will think once again about this terrible absurdity we are living in, and they will think about what can be done to stop it tomorrow.