For 9 months, Irina is without news of her son captured during the Battle of Marioupol. We are carrying out in the small town of Ukraine where she lives in an investigation to try to know what happened to her. In October, We drive with our Swiss plates to Kobeliaki, A peasant town halfway between kyiv and Donbass.

We have our knowledge there, Our friendships, Established on the eve of independence thirty years ago. And our obsessions: Ukrainian deportees, Soviet prisoners of war. Those of the Second World War who fell into the hands of the Nazis continued us for years. The only way to appease these millions of ghosts was, we believed, to devote one or two films to them. And then the music took over, The voices found in the cottages of the province of Poltava, The splendor of the popular choir Kalena, with two films, 4 CDs and half a dozen tours in Switzerland…

But this time, We no longer run after her, It’s the story itself that awaits us at the threshold of the Olga cottage. Her neighbor Iryna has lost track of her son, A police officer converted into a soldier two years before the invasion, And announced missing during the headquarters of Marioupol. Eight months without any news from Olexandr Sergueyvitch, While the first exchange of prisoners has just taken place. Olga told him about the CICR, She knows that it is a bit of our Dada to us Swiss and that we will be able to push research ... How to resist Iyna's tears?

We go to find out. With the ICRC of course. With a team of 600 people it sees the help in semi-trailers at the four corners of the disaster areas. But struggling to record prisoners of war, And even more to visit them. In early April in Marioupol, He could not access those of the Illitch factory. And the last thing the son was able to tell him to his mother Iryna in March, It was that he was entrenched in a basement of Illitch.

In Kobeliaki, Market women are mobilizing. In a flash, We have the addresses of the families of prisoners of war in the district. Our slalom all-terrain between the nests-de-poule on the roads of the hamlets where Victorya await us, The nursing wife who left Marioupol pregnant and gave birth to a girl, And then Marharita, The peasant whose son has been able to be recorded by the ICRC but has not given any sign of life since May.

And soon promised to be the first prisoners' returns from Kobeliaki and their striking stories of captivity. And we will spin kyiv attending the demonstration of wives and mothers of prisoners of war on Maidan square, to the great challenge of martial law. And we will even access Russian prisoners who will tell us about their most ... difficult moments.

Ukraine campaigns under the sirens, current cuts, The burials draped in yellow and blue, The moving relentlessness of mothers and wives: thus was born a quirky portrait of this suffering country, But an astonishing resilience, discovering himself capable of military cohesion while remaining terribly attached to a germ democracy, This very that the big neighbor came to delight him.