We Will Not Fade Away

Alisa Kovalenko – A mosaic portrait of the Donbas teen generation, against the backdrop of the war and the Russian invasion in Ukraine.

“We Will Not Fade Away” was filmed between 2019 and 2022 in Zolote-4 and Stanytsia Luhanska, in the Luhansk region, on the frontline of the Donbass war, which began in the spring of 2014, with the Ukrainian army opposing the separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, which were supported by the Kremlin and the Russian army.

These two localities, which saw violent fighting in 2014 and 2015, are strategic towns. Stanytsia at the time was one of the only points of passage between separatist territory and territory controlled by Ukraine, and Zolote-4 was one of the hearts of coal extraction in Ukraine, the black lands of the exploits of the miner Stakhanov in the 1930s…

For years, the local population has been caught in the grip of recurrent fighting, narrowing the horizons of the young people who have remained with their families on the front line of this war, which for them started 8 years before the Russian invasion of 2022. A generation has grown up in the shadow of war, watching the decline of the working class civilisation of their parents.

After the start of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation on 24 February 2022, Stanytsia Luhanska was very quickly taken over by the Russian army. The Ukrainian army fiercely resisted Zolote, which was finally overrun by Russian forces in June 2022. Since then, both cities have been under the control of the Russian Federation.

The protagonists of “We Will Not Fawde Away”, as well as the majority of their families, were unable to flee and are still in occupied territory. A crackdown has been carried out on the part of the population with pro-Ukrainian sentiments, and filtration camps have been established where civilians are interned and may be subjected to ill-treatment and torture by the Russian occupiers.

It is now well known that teenagers are no exception and are also arrested in these camps, while young boys may be forcibly conscripted into the Russian army to be sent to fight against Ukraine.