Winner of the Audience Award at CPH:DOX, where it opened the festival, Mariinka is Pieter-Jan De Pue’s long-awaited second feature after his Sundance award-winning debut, The Land of the Enlightened. This is not simply another film about war. Shot on 16mm over nearly a decade, it follows young Ukrainians in the frontline town of Mariinka in the Donbas, revealing how conflict slowly reshapes lives, choices, relationships, and dreams. The film looks beyond the headlines to ask what happens when war does not simply interrupt childhood, but becomes the landscape in which an entire generation grows up.Natasha, once a promising boxer, becomes a military paramedic, caring for the wounded while carrying the scars of war herself. Angela, orphaned at a young age, survives by moving goods across the shifting front line, navigating danger and divided loyalties with extraordinary nerve. In an almost Greek tragedy, brothers Mark and Ruslan end up fighting on opposite sides, while their youngest brother Daniil, adopted by a family in the United States, watches the conflict unfold from afar. De Pue’s patient, observational approach allows us to remain with these young people as they grow older, fall in love, make impossible choices, and adapt to circumstances that continually redefine their futures. Rather than capturing war in isolated moments of crisis, Mariinka offers something rarer: the intimate, lived experience of what it means to come of age while conflict becomes part of everyday existence.Richly textured and visually striking, the 16mm cinematography moves between raw observation and lyrical, almost dreamlike passages. Deeply rooted in Ukraine yet universal in its emotional reach, Mariinka is ultimately about youth, hope, survival, and resilience and about the extraordinary human capacity to keep imagining a future even when the world around you is falling apart.Nicole Guillemet