* « Three Comrades offers a fresh and powerful perspective through three young men, two Ukrainians and one Russian, showing how a younger generation can transcend conflict through communication, tolerance, and understanding. We are praising its remarkable cinematography and exceptionally intimate, sensitive approach to the boys, the camera captures their shared experience, vulnerability, and humanity without ever feeling intrusive, making it a truly exceptional and deeply personal film. » Marianna Kaat / Doc@PÖFF Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 

Director's Statement:

When adults start wars, it is their children who are left to bear the consequences. The world we have built is collapsing, and they are forced to grow up among its ruins. For me, Three Comrades is a deeply personal film. One of the three protagonists, the boy his friends nicknamed “the Russian”, is my younger son, Orfey. After the war began, we found ourselves in France, where he met two Ukrainian teenagers, Ruslan and Dima. That was how this story began, bringing to the surface all the fear of the future, the horror of what was happening, and the pain of the present that I had buried deep inside myself and tried to escape from so as not to lose my mind. All I could do was stay close and keep filming. As I immersed myself in this story, I began to understand my own son better, and, through him, what happens to children when the world they know suddenly ceases to exist. When they lose their home, their sense of safety, the familiar world around them, and are forced to search for their place all over again in a foreign country.
Each of these three carries his own trauma, his own losses, and his own loneliness. Their experiences are different, and it was important to me neither to compare their pain nor to measure it. I tried to look at all three of them with the same attention, allowing each of their experiences to pass through me, and to let them remain contradictory, cruel, funny, and vulnerable, exactly as they were.
I did not want to turn them into representatives of their countries. I was interested not in “the Russian” and “the Ukrainians,” but in three young people whom the adult world seemed to have already told who they were supposed to be to one another.
The title Three Comrades is a direct reference to Erich Maria Remarque’s novel of the same name. Almost a hundred years later, a new generation is once again growing up in a world fractured by war, fear, and the loss of home. And once again, friendship becomes one of the last spaces where a human being can remain human. I do not know whether friendship can defeat war. Perhaps cinema should not make such promises at all. But I have seen three boys, each carrying his own pain, manage to see in one another not a nationality, not a side in a conflict, but a human being. And that helps me to keep living, not allowing hatred, fear, and revulsion at any war to become all that is left inside me, but holding on to hope and love for our children. For me, Three Comrades is a film about a generation of children to whom adults have left a world in ruins. And about whether they will be able to build a new one.
Anastasiia Vedenskaia