“Who Is Nelli?” is a documentary about a young Ukrainian woman whose life has been split into two distinct realities by the war. Before the full-scale invasion, Nelli was a student in the acting department. She dreamed of the stage, film, music, love, and a future that seemed wide open. After February 24, 2022, she became a soldier. This is a film about the path between two worlds: the front lines and the stage, military discipline and creative freedom, comrades-in-arms and musicians, war and a voice that did not fade even where, it would seem, there was no room left for it.

Nelli is not a static image of a heroine. She is alive. Vulnerable. Funny. Tired. Stubborn. Strong. Confused. She can be many things, and that is precisely her truth. Alongside her in the film are people who belong to different parts of her life: soldiers, friends, musicians — those who see in her not just a soldier, but a person with a voice, a character, pain, and a dream. Who is Nelli? A soldier? An actress? A singer? A girl who went to war? A woman trying to find herself again? The film doesn’t offer a simple answer. It walks alongside her as she searches for that answer herself.

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I don’t want to make a film about “a woman at war” as a label. I want to make a film about a human being. Nelli is compelling precisely because two seemingly incompatible energies exist in her at once. On one side: the army, discipline, the front, the experience of a young person forced to grow up very fast. On the other: the stage, music, an actor’s nature, the desire to speak, to sing, to stay open. The film is born out of that contradiction. For me, Nelli is not a symbol. She is, rather, an important question. What happens to a dream when war enters a life? Does it vanish? Wait? Break? Or turn into something else? It matters to me that the camera never turns Nelli into a monument. She has to remain a living person. Sometimes strong. Sometimes funny. Sometimes lost. Sometimes silent. Sometimes unsure of what to say. Because the truth lives exactly in those moments. The story moves toward the instant where Nelli’s two worlds meet. The stage becomes not a beautiful finale, but a space where she can hear herself again.

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