I met the Ukrainians Victoria and Sergei at Siret border crossing point shortly after the war had begun in Ukraine. We didn’t get to talk much then, but I visited them a few days later in Suceava, where they spent a couple of nights in an apartment made available by local young actors. Before I left for Suceava, I called Sergei to let him know we were coming.
“How are you? Did you get some rest?”, I asked him.
“I don’t get much sleep,” he replied quietly. “I keep watching the news about the war and I feel like crying.”
It was a cold day with dark skies overhead, and I remember finding them both sitting on the couch watching a news broadcast. She was calm and smiling, but he was nervous and kept lighting up one cigarette after another. “Victoria is the optimist, I’m the gloomy one,” Sergei muttered.
Victoria Bodnar is a screenwriter and producer and Sergei Bukovski is a professor and a documentary film director. They are both over 70. They have worked all their lives in film and television, documenting stories of famine and war all over the former Soviet Union (including Chernobyl). “And I’m thinking that throughout my life I have seen lots of films about refugees from all over the world, but when you’re watching a film, all of it seems someplace far away,” Sergei told me, who was just becoming aware of his refugee status.
On January 24, 2022, they celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary. A month later, on February 24, the war began. Only this time it wasn’t a subject of a film, but something palpable, a personal experience.
They told me then, in the afternoon we met in Suceava, about the moment they left their home on February 24. It was 5 a.m. and they were at home, 15 km away from Kyiv, when they were awakened from their sleep by the sound of an explosion. They jumped out of bed and opened a laptop to check the news. That is how they found out that the Russian army had just invaded Ukraine. The explosion scared them so much that in less than 20 minutes, Victoria and Sergei put together what luggage they could, took their two dogs, Kasha and Kiara, got into the car and set off towards the Ukrainian border with Romania.
“We were so dazed and in such a hurry that we left home without taking anything with us,” Sergei recounted with a heavy sigh. “All my films, my entire archive, all my rolls, all my hard drives, all my life’s work was left behind.”
“Including Sergei’s last unfinished film, which he has been working on for the last five years, was left at home,” Victoria added.
Sergei wanted to say something else, but he seemed to have a lump in his throat that would not let him breathe or speak.
Story donated to the Museum of Abandonment, as part of the Suitcases of Abandonment campaign. Project funded by CARE through the Sera Foundation, Care France and FONPC. The Story was collected by journalist Ionuț Sociu who also wrote on the subject in Scena 9: https://www.scena9.ro/article/refugiati-ucraina-film-documentari. Photos by Marin Raica.
