Icarus Films: Eastern Front

Eastern Front

Directed by Vitaly Mansky and Yevhen Titarenko

98 minutes / Color
Russian; Ukrainian / English subtitles
Release: 2023
Copyright: 2023

Documentary - Expository

Vitaly Mansky

On February 24, 2022, Yevhen Titarenko didn’t have to puzzle over what he should do. He went to the front. And from the first minute of Russia’s large-scale aggression against Ukraine, he began to record everything that surrounded him: his own feelings when the first rockets began to bomb his city; tens of thousands of refugees in a hurry to leave their homes, creating endless traffic jams at city exits; and the friends with whom he went to war – a war which had progressed to the threshold of his own house in Kyiv.

Yevhen is a member of the volunteer medical battalion ‘The Hospitallers’; created in 2014, it now has more than 1,000 people. The battalion’s mission is to provide first aid on the front line and to evacuate the wounded to headquarters or frontline hospitals.

Each mobile brigade includes an armed driver, an armed guard, and two paramedics. Brigades usually work in pairs of two medical vehicles, thus creating a mobile unit. These people are the main characters of the film. From the first hours of the war, we get as close as possible and spend the first half of the year there.

These six months are full of drama, despair, fear, hatred, bitterness, love, and, most importantly, faith in victory.

“A gut-wrenching glimpse of the brutal realities of life and death on the Eastern front in Ukraine's fight to keep back Russian invaders. Among the early documentaries emerging from this brutal war, it is likely to stand the test of time.” —Modern Times Review

“Unflinching in its depiction of violence and the horrors of war.” —KinoKultura