TSYBLI

When we discovered Tsybli, a small village on the banks of the Dnipro River in the Ukrainian countryside, we found a place where the war had already settled into everyday life. Former combat medics Alla and Slava had created a clinic for severely wounded soldiers who had been declared beyond recovery by the medical system. They live there with their children, surrounded by nurses, therapists, volunteers, families and other former soldiers, turning the clinic into something that feels less like an institution and more like a fragile, improvised community. I was drawn to the quiet intensity of this place, where care has become a way of life and where the same gestures are repeated every day: feeding, washing, lifting, waiting, watching, hoping.

Over the years, we began to follow the people who live within this world. Some patients slowly find their way back to movement, speech and a possible future. Others remain suspended between life and death. Some die. Bohdan spends years unconscious under intensive care, while his mother eventually returns to the clinic to work alongside the people who cared for him. Roman remains in a semi-conscious state after brain surgery, his family living with the hope of a recovery that may never come. Dima fights through rehabilitation after spending three months in a coma, while Misha, initially considered unrecoverable after being shot in the face, begins to show unexpected signs of improvement.

But Tsybli is not only a place of loss. Children run through the corridors. Patients, relatives and staff gather in the kitchen. On the smoking porch, doctors, soldiers and families share jokes, music and memories from the front. These ordinary moments became as important to me as the moments of crisis. They reveal how life continues alongside suffering, and how humour, friendship and routine can create a sense of normality in circumstances that are anything but normal.

Initially born as a photographic project and naturally evolved in a full-feature documentary film, TSYBLI is built around time and presence. The changing seasons and surrounding landscape mark the passing of years, while inside the clinic, lives move at a different pace. New patients arrive as others disappear. Hope rises and falls. The work continues.

What stays with us most was the quiet persistence of care. There is no guarantee that anything will change, and yet Alla, Slava and the people around them continue to show up every day. For us, TSYBLI, is about this act of staying. It is about the limits of recovery, but also about the unexpected beauty that can exist within a place built around loss. Above all, it is a film about care as a form of human connection, and about the ways we remain human when there is nothing left to promise except our presence.

TSYBLI is directed and produced by Ukrainian Filmmaker and Creative Producer Lesya Kharchenko, together with Italian-Argentinian Creative Producer and Director of Photography (DOP) Federico Quintana.