Zdeněk Chaloupka

Some journalists need a bit of advice when working in the war - where to go or rather do not, where is be the best view on the ruins of the airport, how to pass through all the checkpoints to the desired place. Fortunately, in every conflict appear also local guides who are happy to provide all the service that journalists need. Media called those people "fixers". The film is a war road movie in eastern Ukraine following the fixer Ruslan accompanying Colombian television crew that wants one thing - to see the war.

Nazar works in Kiev, Ukraine, as a screenwriter. Together with his wife and small son, they live peacefully and nothing indicates that this is about to change. Towards the end of 2013, however, the Maidan square in central Kiev sees masses of protesters who oppose the decision of president Viktor Yanukovych who refused to sign the pending association agreement with the EU. Foreign journalists flock to Kyiv to report from the mass protests and Nazar is one of those who provide them with intel. He becomes a fixer – a translator and a guide for teams of journalists. Soon he realizes that he likes to work in extreme conditions. When, two months later, an open war breaks out in the East, he guides the journalists through the key events of the conflict. He sees the development first-hand and together with the journalists, he creates the testimony that then travels the globe. Soon, however, the war is forgotten. The web documentary The Forgotten war provides a testimony about a conflict that had raged in the Eastern Ukraine for almost four years now. As a guide, Nazar tries to give objective causes of the war, he leads the viewer through the Donbass area, hinting at the complicated local history and the pride of the local miners. Apart from the historic context, however, he shows the viewers the everyday reality of life in the so-called grey zone, the strip of land directly touching the frontlines. The documentary permits us to view the military conflict from the perspective of the locals and witness the everyday situations experienced by the locals in the unstable region. Through Nazar, the viewer gets a chance to learn about the everyday lives of four different people – a small school girl, a humanitarian aid worker, a female doctor and a senior citizen. In the state of war, their everyday rituals often become absurd.

Vivid situations, concentrated observations, journals from scientific expeditions and art compelling animations create a distinctive documentary about the fragile and vital relationships between humans, birds and the landscape.

Through globetrotter, renowned ornithologist and pioneer of telemetric bird tracking Lubomír Peške, we will see how changes in these relationships affect the life and death of birds. And this on the level of individuals, populations and species.

Thanks to transmitters and photo traps, the European honey buzzard, the Ibis or the Blackbird are transformed from anonymous pieces into concrete beings and drawing our attention to their fates. There is a strange contradiction between the fact that humans are able to build a relationship with a specific individual, but that, in Peške's words, in terms of the survival of the population, the means nothing in a way. It is the complex relationships within the environment that must be in order for individual species to thrive.

But when we watch one of the last wild ibis in the Syrian desert, or a family of nuthatch in a box in the garden, we see that individuals do matter. Or rather, it's our relationship with them that matters. Warm attentiveness towards other creatures, which Lubomír Peške shows us in the film, leads us to think about what it actually means to have a living relationship with nature. And what would it mean if such an approach would be common.