Still: Don't Ask Me If I Killed - Helena Maksyom

Take better care of her mother, learn French, learn the piano, travel to the Pacific, finish her film about the childcare system in Ukraine - these were among the goals Ukrainian filmmaker Helena Maksyom set herself for the start of 2022. But then came the full-scale invasion by Russia and her life was turned upside down completely. Four years on, she had volunteered, become an officer in the Ukrainian military and has now made a documentary about her experiences in wartime.

Don’t Ask Me If I Killed premieres June 8 at DocuDays in Kyiv, the city where the director lives. The film, sold by Esther Van Messel’s First Hand Films, follows Maksyom’s progress as a soldier. The lone woman in her unit, Helena learned to endure, tend to the wounded, and forge deep bonds with her comrades, capturing beauty and humanity amid the devastation. The director filmed only “when it was possible” and did not interfere with her work or that of her colleagues as soldiers. The desire to make the film came after the death of her brother-in-arms, 20-year-old Artem. “I really wanted him to be remembered,” she recently commented. 

In the end, though, Maksyom, who had become an officer, left the army after her mother suffered a stroke and she was the caregiver. 

One of the producers is Renko Douze of Amsterdam-based Een van de jongens, who came aboard the project through the EURODOC training workshop (International Lab for Creative Documentary Production). One of the other participants was Romanian producer Adrian Pirvu who was presenting Maksyom’s project, back then called The Soldier’s Journey. 

Pirvu and Maksyom have a long standing professional and personal relationship. They co-directed the wryly titled Everything Will Not Be Fine which premiered at IDFA in 2020. 

“I got to know Adrian first, in a very intense way, during this workshop and I fell in love with the project,” Douze remembers.  

Fellow EURODOC attendee Yasmin C. Rams of production outfit Perennial Lens also joined the project, as German producer. “It ended up with the three of us co-producing this film together with Ukrainian producer Jeanne Maksymenko-Dovhych,” Douze points out.

"What made this coproduction unusual was how genuinely equal it was. Each of the four producers brought a distinct expertise, and the film really emerged from that balance."

The film was edited by Ukrainian editor Svitlana Zaloga and Dutch editor Augustine Huijsser. Sound design (Tim van Peppen), grading (Joel Sahuleka) and image post-production (Fever Film) were also completed in the Netherlands. Maksyom was able sometimes to travel from Ukraine to Amsterdam when she was off duty. At one point, Huijsser also travelled in the reverse direction to Ukraine to work on the project.

Around half the budget came from the Netherlands. Cinema Delicatessen is on board to handle the Dutch release. The international premiere is likely to be at one of the main European documentary festivals later in the year. 

“There’s a lot of very good work going on at the moment, a lot of strong stories,” Douze observes of the wave of hard-hitting Ukrainian documentaries made since the full-scale invasion began. There is sometimes competition between them to attract distributors and festival programmers, but Douze is confident that Don’t Ask Me If I Killed will stand out.

“It’s such a special and individual story. It’s really her story - and it’s a very human perspective on the frontline,” he says.

Don’t Ask Me If I Killed is just one of several projects on Douze’s slate. For instance, he is still pushing ahead with Menno Otten’s archival “city symphony” documentary, Still City. Inspired by the director’s “obsessive interest in faces and human expressions,” this will show the people of Amsterdam in a way they have never been captured on film before. 

“He [Otten] is a mono-maniac,” Douze jokes of the director’s single-minded dedication to the task in hand. “In his attic room, he is just editing and the does it all on his own. He just works crazily, every day, all day.”

The project is already 90% financed and has Box To Box, the company run by James Gay-Rees (Amy) as its UK partner and Visualantics (Steven Dhoedt) as its Belgian co-producer.

Douze is also the producer on Tom Fassaert’s recent tragicomic feature doc Between Brothers, about the intense but troubled relationship between Fassaert’s father, a retired therapist, and the filmmaker’s troubled and solitary uncle. Sold by Film Harbour, this premiered earlier in the year in International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Limelight section.

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