Domashni Igri

SCREENINGS

Monday, 07.10., 7.00 pm, kinoeins, Q&A with Alisa Kovalenko

Alina is 20 years old and one of the best female football players in Ukraine. If this season goes well, she’ll be taken on by the national team. But she has a difficult social and family background: Her mother is dead and her father barely around. She has to look after her two small siblings, apply for social benefits and run the family. There’s little time for football and a professional career in the national team.

Alisa Kovalenko always stays very close to her friendly protagonist. Using narrowly framed images, she observes Alina’s daily struggle, the way she cares lovingly for her siblings and the fact that whatever she does – in the end – it’s not enough, at home or on the soccer pitch. But Alina refuses to give up -no real football player ever would…

ALISA KOVALENKO

The award-winning director Alisa Kowalenko was born in 1987 in Saporischschja in the Ukraine. She studied journalism and took her diploma at the Kyiv National I.K. Karpenko-Kary Theatre, Cinema and Television University, with documentary film as her special subject. She continued her studies at the Andrzej-Wadja film school in Warsaw under the direction of Marcel Łoziński. After her first documentary, Sister Zo, Kowalenko was sucked into the commotions of the Ukrainian revolution and the war in the East of the Ukraine. She filmed on Maidan Square in Kiev and during the battle for Donetsk airport in the Donetsk basin. Her second documentary, Alisa in Warland, arose from this dilemma between the safe, observant distance of a camera and the actual participation in these events, which she was trying to process during her dramatic journey. The film premiered at the IDFA, was presented on 60 more festivals and won awards in Paris, Agadir and Mexico. Home Games is her third documentary.

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