While studying in Belgium, Daryna Mamaisur witnesses Russia’s attack on her home country Ukraine from a distance. It is getting warmer, the chestnut trees are already in bloom, here in Brussels as well as there in Kyiv. Because she cannot find the words, she makes a film that records this spring – in the distance and nearby. She starts a visual correspondence with Tanya in Kyiv who would rather talk about an argument with her partner or the singing of the birds than the droning of the bombs.
The filmmaker, too, is searching for a way of speaking commensurate with her helplessness and shock. She takes voice lessons and interweaves the shots of recital and vocal exercises with the observations she exchanges with her friend. She directs our attention to the fragility of everyday life – and the experience of war that weighs down even the most relaxed, banal moments.

A piece of land awaits Déni Oumar Pitsaev in the Pankisi Gorge, a Chechen enclave in the Georgian part of the Caucasus. His mother bought it for him, hoping to bring her son, who was socialised in Western Europe, back to his Chechen roots. When he arrives, he realises that the gift comes with strings attached: Relatives and friends from the neighbourhood constantly ask when the 40-year-old Déni with his receding hair intends to start a family. When he counters with his own vision – building a treehouse for adults ten metres from the ground, a childhood dream – he triggers complex debates about the relationship between the individual and society and what historical conditions it is subject to: The region is deeply scarred by the effects of the Chechen War, the wounds extending even to his estranged relationship with his father. In all this, Pitsaev’s manner of confrontation is always extremely delicate, never turning into an attack. With expert curiosity, he approaches a world that is both completely alien and home to him.