GENYA

Feature documentary / 82’ / Germany-Ukraine / 2026

Genya is an intimate documentary portrait of a woman who carried an entire century of violence within her. One of the last living witnesses to both Stalinism and Nazism, she survived the execution of her father, the deportation of her family, forced labour in Germany, torture, and imprisonment in Ravensbrück.In the final months of her life, she searches for a way to die in peace, returning again and again to the question that has shaped her existence: whether forgiveness is possible after the unforgivable, and whether memory can become a way of resisting the repetition of history.Through Genya’s final reflections, the film explores memory not as history sealed in the past, but as something that continues to shape the present. Less than a year after her death, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine gives her moral dilemma a new and devastating urgency.Rooted in close observation and emotional precision, Genya is a film about dignity, suffering, and the fragile boundary between the impossibility of forgiveness and the impossibility of dying without it.

STILLS

CREDITS

Directed and produced by
Lesya KharchenkoCinematography
Yuriy Meshcheryakov
Artem VasyliievPhotography
Yulia WeberEditing
Mila MeshcheriakovaMusic / Sound
Valentyn Silvestrov
Ostap Kukhar
Anatolii ZhygalovGraphic Designer & Animator
Ihor GrytsykColorist
Andrii OrlykDIT
Grygorii Zinchenko

Supported by

CONTACT

Dykhai Production LLC
Kyiv, Ukraine
+380 50 334 87 90
[email protected]