Vladyslav Piatin-Ponomarenko, 17 y.o. Was under blockade in Mariupol for 75 days and shot the documentary film about his experience.
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I can remember the entire time of the occupation of Mariupol as gray, scary, and incomprehensible. I immediately set my mind to the fact that it was necessary to go through this horror and survive. I remember that there was panic in the first days, there was a lack of products in the stores, and it was dangerous to stand in queues – the projectile could arrive at any moment. I can compare this time to Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. Then I was walking in a coat, riding a bicycle, passing corpses of dead people and destroyed houses, and writing the book.
It was a surreal time when some non-humans came and destroyed everything, and now they were dictating to me who and what I was.
I spent 75 days in the blockade and could not imagine that thousands of missiles, canon shells and bombs would hit our homes. We had a large family and two neighbors. We had almost no food and survived on what we had. And on March 7, at 6:05 a.m., the projectile hit our house, right in the neighbor’s apartment located across the hall. I will remember that moment for the rest of my life. Then we moved into the basement, going out only occasionally to prepare food.
In order not to go out of my mind, not to be afraid, and to be of some use to society, I decided to document everything that happened to us. There had been a power cut since February 25, so we were shooting with Dad’s old amateur camera, sometimes with my phone, and I even took some shots with my laptop’s webcam. We did it together with my father. I am grateful to him for his help in the information war against the Russian propaganda.
I wanted that, through these shots, people could at least somehow feel everything what happened to us in Mariupol.
One of the most important songs in my life that saved my psyche in Mariupol was John Lennon’s “Imagine”. So, I decided that it would sound at the beginning of the film. Our city was incredible, green and comfortable, it was a city for artists, for the creation of something new. The city that lets you be yourself. And in a flash,
it turned into a slaughterhouse where people crawled to survive and not become a piece of meat.
I think that directing documentaries and feature films allows me to be free and to give something to this world. So, this is the work I would like to associate my future with. It is important to me that people feel the value of every life and figure out who they really are.