The world premiere of MARIINKA, the second feature documentary by Belgian filmmaker Pieter-Jan De Pue (The Land of the Enlightened), allows CPH:DOX, the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, to open its 23rd edition with a cinematic experience that takes audiences inside Ukrainian lives shaped by war. Going beyond the daily news tidbits and headlines, the doc, shot on 16mm film, brings urgency and nuance alike to the story of people from what is now a destroyed city in the Donbas region.
The co-production between Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden covers an extended period of time, beginning long before the world watched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, which eventually led to Mariinka being destroyed, with no civilians living there anymore.
The film follows several young Ukrainians whose lives have been forever shaped by more than 10 years of war and conflict in the Donbas region. Among them are a young woman who is a promising boxing talent turned military paramedic, and a young woman smuggling goods and more across the front line to survive. Evoking echoes of a Greek tragedy, the film also tells the story of two brothers fighting on opposite sides of the war, while their youngest brother now lives with a foster family in the U.S. and follows the news from afar.
As MARIINKA unspools, it touches on such themes as family and belonging, memory and identity, and how national loyalties can trump the bonds of blood.
Directed by De Pue and produced by him via his Savage Film and Bart Van Langendonck, in co-production with Christian Beetz via Beetz Brothers Film Production, Femke Wolting and Bruno Felix of Submarine, Vincent Metzinger, Emilie Blézat of Dark Riviera, Naoko Films, Shelter Prod, and ZDF in collaboration with ARTE, with the participation of RTBF Documentary Unit, VRT, VPRO, and SVT. Films Boutique is handling international sales.
MARIINKA is one of the six films featured in the second edition of Europe Docs!, an online showcase jointly curated by European Film Promotion and CPH:DOX that is designed to put a spotlight on outstanding European documentaries and improve access to the North American market.
CPH:DOX 2026 runs March 11–22 in the Danish capital. Its artistic director, Niklas Engstrøm, expressed pride about opening the fest with MARIINKA, highlighting how the film was shaped through European co-production and “years of engagement with CPH:DOX’s industry platforms.” And he lauded De Pue for spending “nearly a decade staying with this story – not chasing the news cycle, but listening to lives shaped by a war that began long before it filled our headlines and continues as the world’s gaze threatens to drift elsewhere.”
De Pue talked to THR about how MARIINKA came about, its universal themes, filming in war times, crafting cinematic moments that connect different points of time, and what’s next for him.
When did you start planning or imagining MARIINKA as a film?
I shot my previous film, The Land of the Enlightened, in Afghanistan. One crew member was a Ukrainian guy who in 2014 was called up by the Ukrainian Army, because at that time the war started in the Donbas, and we later actually followed him to Ukraine. And a bit similar to how it happened in Afghanistan, I was asked by the International Red Cross to take pictures of their humanitarian aid activities on both sides of the front line.
While doing that, I discovered the story of these four brothers through one of the brothers, Ruslan, who was fighting for the separatist movement. He explained to me that he had a brother on the other side, the Ukrainian side. He also had a brother who was disabled and tried to reunite both brothers, and another brother who was adopted by an American family in Mississippi and was now living there. And he told me that they all grew up in an orphanage in Mariinka, which was a very small town on the outskirts of Donetsk.
I started trying to figure out the story of these brothers and how it was possible that a family got divided. So I started doing long interviews with all the brothers and eventually also went to America to do a long interview with the American brother. When I went back to Mariinka, where they grew up, I discovered that there were also lots of young people living there who tried to deal with the reality of the war and survive somehow, including Natasha and Angela. Angela was involved in smuggling activities, and Natasha wanted to become a boxing champion and started her studies in medical science.
And then the war broke out, the full-scale invasion. Of course, that changed a lot, not only for the characters, but also for our film. The whole script suddenly had to be completely changed and rewritten.
While watching the film, I was struck by how there is all this change, yet there are also persisting elements, such as the tension and differences of opinions and allegiances…
Yeah, exactly. Our main aim in the film was to tell a story about all those characters who came from that place where division was everywhere. We are not showing all of that. For example, Natasha also had two brothers fighting on different sides. This has been a reality, and I thought little was being told about all these deeper family ties and divisions, which are not black and white at all. Of course, it’s very hard to talk about these bigger themes in times of war, but I thought that would be an interesting story.
We didn’t really want to dive into a film that was going to be too politicized. Of course, Russia is the aggressor. Russia has invaded. That’s all true, but it can also become a big trap. To really humanize [stories of] this war, it was much more important to dive much deeper into the personal stories of each of the individual characters. What connected all of them was the place they were from, Mariinka, which actually does not exist anymore. It was taken over by the Russian Army and completely decimated. There is nothing left of that place anymore, so only memories of and reflections on the youth of all the characters will remain.
In some scenes, you seem to merge narrative storytelling with documentary. For example, there is a scene where we see Natasha dance in the remains of a destroyed hall with a stage, along with older footage of dance performances from her school days. How did you create those?
I followed those characters for a long time, and in the beginning, I did not really know what I would be using from [the material we were] shooting. When I was with Natasha during a school celebration in 2018, where she got her diploma and where she was doing this graduation dance and all that, it was because she was an interesting character, so we just followed her in her daily life.
But I did not know if we were going to use that footage. Nobody knew what was going to happen back then. So it was only in 2023, when Natasha was already working as a paramedic in the Ukrainian Army, that she asked me if it was possible to check with the military’s fighting units, if we could get access for her to visit her home, her old school, and the grave of her mother for a last time. We didn’t know what we were going to see there. We eventually went with an escort of the army, because the front line was very close, less than a kilometer away.
Everything around was bombed, but we went back to all those places. And then in her house, she found a dress, medals and all these drawing books [of hers]. When she found that dress, I came up with this idea to go back to the theater and do a last dance, not with her fellow students, but with fellow soldiers that she’s serving with. It was very spontaneous.
How difficult was it to get access to both the Ukrainian and Russian sides? Did you face any worries that you could be working with the respective other country?
It was indeed complicated, especially when we were filming the brothers, going between the Ukrainian and the pro-Russian sides. It always [involved] many interrogations. Where are we going or where have we been? They were checking our phones. We had to put our geo-location on. They were checking where we were at the front line. But I was very open about what we were filming. They knew about the story of the brothers in war.
The Ukrainian side asked me to give them the contacts of the commanders we were with at the Donetsk airport. But I told [them] I was not going to do this, because then the separatists would ask me for the same. Of course, on the Ukraine side, it was easier to negotiate, because Ukraine was striving for democratic values and press freedom and moving towards our more European way of living. But with Russia, of course, it’s different, so we had to be much more careful. But at the same time, we discovered that for Russia, it was also interesting to help us because they were trying to, at least at that time, I’m not saying that is [still the case], say that Russia was not involved in the war. They were saying that this was a civil war and that all the conflicts had started within Ukraine.
Of course, that wasn’t the case at all, so it was always a matter of playing with these very thin lines, interrogations, trying to build trust and finding the personal interest of each side, while allowing us to tell our story. So, it was not easy.
Did it get really dangerous during film shoots?
Of course. The most dangerous moment was after the full-scale invasion, because there was so much more shelling, shooting, and there were all kinds of clashes going on. It was with way bigger intensity compared to before the full-scale invasion. So yeah, I spent lots of time with Ukrainian soldiers in trenches and heard bullets and explosions nearby. You have to pay attention to drones at all times. The commanders were straightforward: “You can film, but don’t make your mother cry.”
At the beginning of the war, rules were more or less flexible, but later on, it became way harder to get to the front line. But we had been filming the fight of the brothers for a long time already, so there was enough war footage by then to bring the war into the film in terms of visuals. It then became much more of a priority to film [such elements as] Natasha as a paramedic on the front line and to get embedded with the medical unit to see her at work in an ambulance and stabilization points.
I heard that you’re bringing people who worked on MARIINKA to the world premiere in Copenhagen?
Yeah, but it’s mainly about getting them permissions to leave the country. It’s much more difficult for men to leave the country now than for women. We were intending to have Angela there, but she had some problems with paperwork, because she’s living and working in Poland now. But Natasha [Borodynia, one of our protagonists,] and our [line] producer Anna [Konik], who was behind the scenes for all these years, will be there. Poland is processing Angela’s paperwork, and she cannot leave the country during that process. But there will be a Polish premiere for the film.
Your film may be a story about people in the Donbas region, but I feel it deals with themes that people in other parts of the world will recognize. Would you agree?
Definitely. Families being divided and fighting at opposite sides of the front line is not a new topic. Basically, history is repeating itself, so it’s a story of all times. That’s why we worked on lifting the story to a broader cinematographic language and a broader understanding. It’s not only a film about the story of four brothers and people from Mariinka, but there are so many aspects involved: religion, brotherhood, family ties, loyalty. We wanted to tell a story that is as rich as possible.
Do you know what your next film will be about?
I think my next project is going to be my first fiction film. It is based on a story in the southern part of Belgium, in Ardennes, which is a forested area. It was also very well known during the Second World War as the place where the Germans were fighting the last [battle] with the Americans. It’s going to be a fiction film based on true elements and start with the resistance against the German occupiers. But then it talks about after the Second World War and this story of two brothers who were involved in poaching. They had a huge business shooting all the deer and boars in the forest in the ’80s and supplying them to very high-end restaurants all over the country.
It’s a story about two brothers who split up. One got completely megalomanic and wanted to have more money. With him, it is about the addiction to money, respect and everything else. And the other brother decided to look for his identity and travel around the world. So, it’s about the rise and fall of two brothers who broke up and then come back together for a last time before they die.
