Journey to the End
“Journey to the end” will be journey through war-torn Bucha, Kharkiv, Pokrovsk and Kherson. The journalist Sergei Sturhetsky with the accompanying camera meets people affected by the war, take part in funeral rites for victims and Easter rituals, travel through the devastated world, meets the legendary artillery commander at the front – Hayduk – and the Russian apocalypse captors called Orcs. Conversations with people we meet on the way paint a picture of Ukrainians who, through a lack of identity and widespread corruption, have brought upon themselves the punishment of war and Russian occupation. We hear that the Western world does not want the war to end quickly. The abstraction of the war experience is complemented by a young girl sitting next to a pile of teddy bears at a bus stop in Dnipro. They are piled there in memory of the children from the bombed orphanage, the ruins of which the girl shows Sergei. Another dimension of the tragedy is found in the prisoner-of-war camp, where we meet the Orcs - Ukrainian mercenaries, often from the area of Donbass. Talking to them, Sergei tries to get to the bottom of why they chose evil in this war. Sergei’s journey to the end is not only a documentation of war-torn Ukraine but – above all - it is a journey into the depths of the Ukrainian people, the injustices suffered, the inhuman events. It is a journey into the heart of darkness, which took on a very clear face in this war. But the end of this nightmare is still far away.