The documentary “Traces” by directors Alisa Kovalenko and Marysia Nikitiuk premiered in the Panorama section of the Berlin International Film Festival. The film tells the stories of Ukrainian women who survived sexual violence committed by Russian soldiers.
It is one of three Ukrainian films at this year’s festival and the only one focused on present-day Ukraine. After the screening at Berliner Festspiele, the audience rose to its feet and gave prolonged applause to the filmmakers and the women featured in the film.
The documentary centers on Iryna, Tetiana, Liudmyla, Halyna, and Olha. Film critic Irina Karpova wrote that, despite the weight of its subject, the film has a powerful healing effect and depicts not only trauma but also the women’s collective effort to work through it.
Kovalenko herself survived sexual violence committed by Russian military personnel in Donbas in 2014, though her own story is not included in the film. After the start of the full-scale invasion, she joined the Ukrainian Volunteer Army and spent several months at the front.
One of the film’s central figures is Iryna Dovhan, founder of the Ukrainian organization SEMA, which brings together and supports women who survived wartime sexual violence. In 2014, in the self-proclaimed DPR, she was accused of cooperating with Ukraine’s Security Service, tied to a pole, and publicly humiliated and beaten in footage later aired by Russia’s Channel One, where she appeared holding a sign reading “Traitor.”
In the film’s closing section, its authors state that rape is being used as one of the tools of genocide against the Ukrainian people.
According to Karpova, “Traces” portrays the processing of trauma through solidarity and shared resistance. In her view, the film argues against treating rape during war as “collateral damage” and insists that such crimes must not be kept silent.