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COMPANY OF STEEL

ZALIZNA SOTNYA

By Yuliia HONTARUK

Drama - Post-Production 2023

After enduring horrors during the War in the Eastern part of Ukraine (2015), three young Ukrainian war veterans return home, both stronger than before and full of scars. They try to find out how to belong in this old but new reality and win their private wars, try to understand how to live in civil

- Year of production
- 2023
- Genres
- Drama, Documentary
- Countries
- UKRAINE, LATVIA
- Languages
- UKRANIAN
- Budget
- 0 - 0.3 M$
- Duration
- 110 mn
- Director(s)
- Yuliia HONTARUK
- Producer(s)
- Ivanna KHITSINSKA (#BABYLON`13), Alexandra BRATYSHCHENKO (#BABYLON`13), Uldis CEKULIS (VFS Films)
- Synopsis
- Lyosha, call sign 'Dancer' used to be a scout, Sergey 'Shakhta' had been working for TV, Andrey 'Potter' had been a jeweler. Like thousands of other young men, they went to war as volunteers, without any fighting experience. All of them were part of the same regiment. The main arena is the Russia-Ukrainian War, and one of the most important events was the Shyrokynske offensive operation, where the protagonists suffered losses that changed them forever. It is very important to realise that they are not professional soldiers, they just wanted to serve their country. Therefore this film shows how a normal, non-military person, like us, went through such a horrifying experience.
  They needed to accept death. They say it was the only way they could perform their duties without fear. They adapted to the extreme situation in order to survive, and they succeeded. Now as men changed to the epic proportions they come back home to the same old environment they left, normal and peaceful. They feel like Titans, super-humans because they endured something others never did.
  But accepting death is a kind of experience that changes you forever. Living on with it can be tough. They call it “baking”.
  Where is a place in ordinary life for people like that?
  The film tells a story of each of their individual search to figure it out.
  The storyline of Dancer tells about post-traumatic growth, how a man can be shattered down and rebuild himself stronger, to serve others. Shakhta’s one is a story of finding oneself, an attempt of becoming a businessman in a profession that reveals to be an atonement, out of the guilt of surviving, while others didn’t, and perhaps even because of him. And Potter’s fight is about desperate attempt to prevent the war from taking his free, joyful spirit away, to cling to his innocence, the loss or change of which he is yet to confront.
  In February 2022 full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine started and our heroes came back to volunteer regiment. Will they survive in this Russian-Ukrainian War and how this war will change them…