“A touching and gut-wrenching tribute to the men and women of Ukraine who refuse to be oppressed.”

“I wonder if I’m afraid to die”

Filmmaker, mother, soldier. An unlikely combination, but in Alisa Kovalenko’s frontline documentary My Dear Theo they come together in a heartfelt and deeply personal way. When Russia tried to invade Ukraine on February 22nd, 2022, Kovalenko made a choice: while her partner would take their young son Theo to the safety of family abroad in France, she joined the Ukrainian volunteer army to defend her country. In her mid-thirties at the time, Kovalenko’s soft-faced appearance belies a mental toughness that made her go to the frontlines again, eight years after she embedded herself with troops in the Donbas in 2014 to shoot her film Alisa in Warland. During that stint she was captured at a checkpoint and sexually assaulted by a Russian officer, who told her she was lucky to still be alive when she was released. There is more behind her friendly and curious gaze than just a mother or indeed a filmmaker; she is alive and well, and ready to kick the invader out of her country.

Sent with her brigade to the Kharkiv region near the Ukraine-Russia border, during the long lulls between combat action Kovalenko does what she knows best: pick up her camera and document life. She films herself and her fellow soldiers in moments of boredom, anxiety, or joy when they are having video conversations with the Homefront on their phones through Starlink; Elon Musk’s satellite network is a lifeline for Ukraine in this war, and the current deterioration in US-Ukraine relationships might put this at risk. This results in a remarkable portrait of common people fighting on the frontlines, for their loved ones and their country, something rarely (if ever) seen in war documentaries. Kovalenko pieces this together as a video diary for young Theo, who occasionally pops up as a reprieve from some of the film’s darker moments, his giddiness lighting up both his mother’s face and the screen.

Kovalenko’s musings are memories for her son to hear, maybe not at his young age but later, when maybe she isn’t there anymore to tell the stories herself. This is a devastating undercurrent running through My Dear Theo, the realization that life can end in the blink of an eye. As the film unfolds we start to recognize faces, if not names, and when these faces appear one final time at the end of the film, accompanied by their names and their date of death in combat, it is a gut-punching reminder that the people we have been watching are not some nameless soldiers, abstract figures fighting a war on a front we can never see or imagine, but fathers, sons, and husbands (Kovalenko is the only woman in the brigade). The film’s footage ends on a grim note already as their return to a former hideout in a high school finds it destroyed and reveals the loss of a comrade they shared the space with.

Scenes earlier in the film document some of their time there, with fragments of the carefree shooting of hoops in the school’s gymnasium juxtaposed against the poignant image of homework assignments dated February 23rd, 2022 still scribbled on a blackboard. The film is a constant struggle for balance between lighthearted humanity and harsh reality. One of Kovalenko’s comrades, contemplating becoming a barista after the war because he is so adept at brewing java, is juxtaposed against the screaming of cows as they cross farmland, because the animals go unmilked and are dying of thirst. A drill sergeant who used to be a monk in Tibet is countered by a long shot of people kneeling by the side of the road as the brigade’s vehicles pass by (a similar scene exists in Olha Zhurba’s Songs of Slow Burning Earth, also shown in this edition of CPH:DOX). Peaceful shots of nature and an upbeat Easter celebration versus the constant sound of shelling in the distance.

My Dear Theo‘s main issue is the boredom of the people on screen at times translating to a listlessness in the viewer. Life at the front isn’t a barrage of violence, bullets whistling by and shells flying over your head; it’s often periods of waiting and trying to kill time. That does not make for the most interesting days, and during stretches of the film neither does it make for the most interesting viewing experience. But should people who lay their lives on the line for their country perhaps be allowed a bit of dullness and the occasional joy of seeing a loved one on a tiny screen? Three years into the war, with the country not only squeezed by its aggressor but increasingly also by the US’ new administration, complaining about the lack of action in a film about Ukraine’s fight for freedom is a sign of luxury that the West permits itself, as it does not have to endure such existential battles. Kovalenko went out of rotation after four months to edit her previous film (2023’s Girl Away From Home), but the men she honors at the end of the film chose to fight on until their final breath. As much as My Dear Theo is a film about the strength and love of a mother-child bond even in the hardest of times, it is also a touching and gut-wrenching tribute to the men and women of Ukraine who refuse to be oppressed.