Student's winning film gives diary-style recount of Ukraine invasion
CBC
First-year journalism student Polina Kozlova surprised some of her classmates, professors and herself when a film she made about her experience during the Russian invasion of Ukraine won best picture at a shorts festival put on by St. Thomas University students.
"It was like a confession," said Kozlova, who usually doesn't talk much about her war experience.
In My Home, she describes what she saw, heard and felt when the invasion began. Her six-minute video-diary-style account is interspersed with scenes of tanks rolling in, bombed out apartment buildings and fiery projectiles falling from the sky.
Kozlova recorded it without a script. Some of the scenes were recorded in her home town by her friends, at personal risk should their phones have been searched.
"I was trying to make people feel how I was feeling in first days of war," she said in an interview.
"It's such a confusing feeling. You don't understand what's going on. … It's like watching your life slowly ruined. … You're just observing and trying to decide what to do next."
Kozlova describes herself as a happy 16-year-old before the war. She had good friends. She was experiencing her first teenage love.
On the first day of the invasion, she was at home in Kherson with her eight-year-old brother.
"I was trying to play board games with him, talk to him," and to ignore what was happening outside the window, she said.
Her mother was at the boarding school where she worked as a teacher. Her father was at his place of business.
She called them asking what to do. They told her to pack her bags.
Like many Ukrainians, Kozlova fled the country because of the war. She ended up going to Halifax with a friend of her parents, who thought it would be a better place for her to study in peace.
The rest of her family stayed in Ukraine. Her father couldn't leave because of mandatory military service rules. Her mother wouldn't leave without him.
The first years in Canada were difficult, stressful and unhappy, Kozlova said.
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