WE LIVED IN MARIUPOL
an upcoming animated short film
WE LIVED IN MARIUPOL is an animated short film in progress. It is based on an interview with a refugee from Mariupol recorded by Sonia Bromberg (Cash for Refugees team) in October 2022 in the city of Lutsk, Ukraine.
Cash for Refugees co-founder Natasha Dukach and I agreed we would turn this into an animated short many months ago. They have even rebranded since then and are now called See Forward Ukraine. I struggled to find the correct angle to approach the story. Simply archiving the survivors’ testimonials in animated form no longer seemed enough. My trusted visual metaphors that I used for my previous Diaries of War animated short seemed old. As this bloody war dragged on, every visual language I tried seemed false.
Eventually, I decided to turn to comics as an art form that allows to strip any story of the details and extract the very essence of the memoir. This is how this short surrealist comic was born and got published in the Visual Storytelling & Comic Arts Anthology 2024 at MassArt. This short comic also serves as the storyboard for the upcoming animated short.
