He is 46 years old, but his life is already a destiny intertwined with the history of his country. By staying in Kyiv on February, 24th 2022, when the Russians invaded his country, he changed the course ofthe conflict. The president he was had become a war chief, straight in his khaki T-shirt, reviewing his troops on the front line or touring capitals, dusting-off diplomacy like no one before.
Since February, 24th 2022, Zelensky has been the embodiment of a nation on the front lines, Ukraine. Born in the town of Kryvyï Rih, raised in the Soviet style like all the young children of his generation, he is now fighting against Putin’s Russia. This film tells the story of this double metamorphosis.
Using photos, film archives and never-before-seen eyewitness accounts, this movie will paint a portrait of Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine : in Kryvyï Rih, the town of his roots and education, and in 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 be based around the men and women who have known and worked with him from his earliest childhood right up to the present day. Also featuring in this film, the team that surrounded him in the exercise of power and the ones who are still by his side since the beginning of the war.
But there’s much more, and the story we want to tell is even more astonishing. 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 he never talked 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 will be a film that will remain relevant for years to come.