Golubky - the guys from Dnipro River

What does it mean being 18 years old and being forced to leave home in order to survive? The story of a group of theater students dealing with the aftermath of the war in Ukraine.

The rooms of the CAS [extraordinary reception centres] have become shared bedrooms, cartoon images are projected on the empty walls, the patio that collects spare parts for the kitchens is now a meeting point. A group of 20-year-olds roll a cigarette, familiar words are heard in the air: distress, displacement, being taken.

The guys talk of escaping or being taken by force. They are between 18 and 24 years old and they were students at the National University of Theatre in Kyiv. In the past few months they had to leave everything behind - studies, families, friends - leaving blindly for Verona where they were welcomed in a shelter project, called Stage4Ukraine, for young drama students fleeing the war.

Six months after the outbreak of the war, they stage a metatheatrical drama to recount the forced exodus from their country, the anguish of uprooting, the search for meaning: theatre is one of the means to process trauma.

What does it mean to be in your twenties, to be forced to abandon everything and take refuge in a foreign country to save your life?

"We met the Kyiv' sun and the bodies of loved ones who died, the loss of a home, border crossings to meet our love, panic attacks, anxiety disorders, first performances... People trying to live. No, people trying to go on living. I'd like to feel something about youth, these are supposed to be our happy days, we are growing now, we are blossoming now... Instead, it turned out like this.", says Hlib Klymenko, 21 years old.

In their daily life, the guys investigate the meaning of the words "stay", "return", "believe", the sense of belonging to a people, what being stateless entails. They feel on their skin the deprivation of freedom, the theft of the future they had begun to build, thus making them part of the young generation contemporary and future to the war. Witnesses of the invasion of their country, those who will pick up the post-war rubble.

Through the images of these young guys, of their painful and imposed journeys, this project aims to recount their daily reality at the mercy of the ruthlessness of an interrupted time.