Very fair and endearing, Alisa Kovalenko’s documentary will be screened Tuesday in Paris during a fundraising evening for Ukraine.
In the story that Alina tells her little brother and sister, Cinderella wears studs. It is even thanks to these studs that the prince recognizes his beloved. The rest, we know – they married, lived happily ever after, “and died the same day”, a certain kind of absolute bliss. It is because it is often a question of death, in the documentary shot in 2018 by the Ukrainian Alisa Kovalenko, Home Games. Sometimes his shadow just passes – “You have to be ready to die on the pitch!” yells the coach of the football team in a suburb of Kyiv where Alina trains, who dreams of national team. Sometimes death sets in, when Alina’s mother dies and the young woman finds herself raising her siblings with the help of her grandmother in their microscopic apartment. And everywhere the camera is there, following the endearing galleyan in her mourning and her misadventures. The film could have turned into a melodrama, on the contrary it impresses with its accuracy, its ability to put itself at the height of a child, to film games and baths in close-up, to catch the life that persists in continuing, the gait Alina’s good man, who struggles to get everything done, babysitting, football training, cleaning the bathtub…
Home Games, which we cannot recommend too much viewing, is available on Netflix, but will mainly be screened on Tuesday at the Balzac cinema in Paris. During this charity evening organized by Fipadoc and Scam, another award-winning documentary filmed in Ukraine will also be screened, The Distant Barking of Dogs, by Dane Simon Lereng Wilmont. The two filmmakers were filming together, a few days before the war, a new documentary whose filming has, in fact, been interrupted. Alisa Kovalenko has joined the armed forces, and Simon Lereng Wilmont is moving heaven and earth to find Oleg, the hero of his film, who disappeared in the siege of Mariupol. We would also like to know what happened to Alina, her family, her friends. All the funds raised on Tuesday will be donated to the French Red Cross, and to the ICFR (International Coalition for Filmmakers at Risk).