In 2011, as part of the film and educational program "The World from Dawn till Dusk" teachers cooperating with the Doc’n’World Foundation they met in Kiev with a group of young Ukrainian filmmakers. In the course of intensive workshops led by prominent Polish documentary filmmakers, the film "Kiev from Dawn till Dusk" have been created, which was the result of joint work of several dozen students.
When toward the end of 2013 public protests began, our students with a sense of civic and documentary duty were their observers and participants. They stayed on the Maidan day and night, recording everything around them. And the things that happened were important, not only for Ukraine but also for the whole world. We wanted to help them gain some distance to heated reality, to deepen the analysis of phenomena and try to build a synthesis. We offered them participation in the new project "The Young People about Themselves".
When in April 2014 we met in Kiev, the weight of events was slowly moving from Maidan to the East. It was a moment of annexation of the Crimea. We were iimmensely impressed by the passion, maturity and determination of our students. We have watched the fantastic footage they took during the hottest events on the Maidan. Also we worked intensely on the documentation of their ideas about young Ukrainians. Seven of the most interesting projects, thematically related to the Maidan, we decided to combine into one full-length documentary film titled "The Euromaidan Almanac".
A careful analysis of extensive archival footage and an attempt to build the dramatic structure of the whole movie led us to the conclusion that the key figure is Alisa Kovalenko and her story. Thus was born the idea of the film "Alisa in Warland".
The movie tells the dramatic story of a Kiev film school student who takes part in a protest on Maidan. Driven by documentary filmmaker instinct, but also by a sense of civic responsibility, the observer is gradually turning into a participant of those events. When the war in the East of the country begins, Alisa goes there with a camera. She reaches the hottest spots on the front. She is taken prisoner for a few days by separatists. Nevertheless, she does not give up, continue filming everything happening around her. The result is a very personal film-diary directed by Alisa Kovalenko and Liubov Durakova.