Sybilla Marie Wester Tuxen

This dazzling visual yearbook transports the viewer to a pastoral Danish boarding school where 120 teenagers quickly go from total strangers to chosen family. The students find friendship, romantic love, heartbreak and most importantly, kindness for themselves in their mistakes and first-time experiences. Living on their own, without parents or the comforts of home, they learn intensively and develop self-esteem, confidence and coping mechanisms as a group. Together, they foster the ability to be completely and unselfconsciously themselves in the company of others, which creates a climate of acceptance and self-love so strong that, when the COVID-19 pandemic sends everyone home early, the kids can rely on it remotely.

In this film war is an atmosphere, rather than a series of journalistic facts. Through music we visit all layers of society. In the form of a poem we show how it feels when your country is in an unwinnable conflict. Dusk sets the scene for a war that came unexpectedly. The soldier smokes his last cigarette in the window before taking the elevator to certain death. A mother prays for the sons of Ukraine. A babushka at Maidan sings: “If he meets death – may it be instant”.

Alyona, Alika and Katya dream of love and friendship, but most of all of leaving Putin’s Russia. When the war against Ukraine breaks out, it becomes harder for the three young women to leave the vast country in the East, but also even more unbearable to stay. So one has left for Georgia, another for Spain, while the third stays behind in Russia. Their generation does not believe that political engagement changes anything. Instead, they show their resistance by living a modern and more Western life, where gender, sexuality, pop music and identity issues are vital. Set at night in cars, apartments and backyards, Sybilla Tuxen’s dark and artistically uncompromising debut film tells the story of a rebellious yet resigned section of Russian youth on the fringes of established society.