No one has come to symbolise Ukraine more than its battered president, Volodymyr Zelensky. By staying in Kyiv when the Russians invaded his country, he changed the course of the conflict. But the story of Zelensky is one of many contradictions. Featuring rare access to President Zelenksy and the people who have known him since his childhood – as well as photos, film archives and never-before-seen eyewitness accounts – this film paints a picture of both the president and his country.
Since February 24, 2022, Zelensky has been the embodiment of a nation on the frontlines. Born in the town of Kryvyï Rih, raised in the Soviet style like all young children of his generation, he is now fighting against Putin’s Russia. This film tells the story of this double metamorphosis.
It paints a portrait of Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine – in Kryvyï Rih, the town of his roots and education, and Kyiv, the capital of his success in the world of show business and the audiovisual industry – through astonishing images and privileged witnesses. As well as featuring an interview with Zelensky, this film will centre around the men and women who have known and worked with him from his earliest childhood right up to the present day. Also featured in this film: the team who surrounded him in the exercise of power and those who have stayed by his side since the beginning of the war.
But there’s more to the story than that. In 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky presented himself as a new man – young, with no political past, different from the Russian apparatchiks in place before independence in 1991 or the oligarchs left behind. He “sold” himself as the first president of independent Ukraine. Yet Volodymyr Zelensky was born in 1978, at a time when the big Soviet brother was extending his hold and imprint over all the countries of the empire. To be born and grow up at that time was to receive a communist education. This is obviously a taboo subject for a young resistance leader from a state besieged by Putin’s Russia, a former KGB cacique. But neither did he talk about it during his campaign.
Directed by renowned French documentary filmmaker Yves Jeuland, respected French journalist Ariane Chemin, and historian and documentalist Lisa Vapné, this film will remain relevant for years to come.