The Synopsis
WOUNDED LAND
Traveling across war-torn Ukraine, we tell the stories of Ukrainian vintners and farmers who, against all odds, remain actively producing during wartime, and protect their country. They help as volunteers or fight as soldiers while defending their land, which the Russian armed forces are destroying. Before the invasion, some were building their businesses, but today they are forced to work even harder to keep their entrepreneurial spirit alive.
Gallery
The Proposal
WOUNDED LAND 2
Wounded Land (2022) tells the story of Ukraine’s winemakers, and their determination to continue with production amidst the terror and destruction of the Russian invasion. The film was received to wide acclaim and, in 2023, was the winner of the Grand Prix Award at Spain’s prestigious Most Wine International Festival.
Yet their story does not end there. As the war drags on, winemakers face not only destruction of their lands but death of loved ones and the heartbreaking uncertainty of survival of their country and way of life. In 2026, we hope to begin production on Wounded Land 2.
We will follow the tracks of pre-war filming in 2021, and visit some places we filmed in 2022 when the full-scale Russian invasion began. The continuation of the film will tell the vintner’s dramatic survival story, their efforts to rebuild, and the extreme challenges they underwent over the last several years of the war. We will visit the oldest Ukrainian Trubetskoi Chateau (located in southern Ukraine), where the invaders destroyed and robbed vineyards, historical buildings, and a collection of rare wines. When filming in 2022, we couldn’t even imagine what a tragic course the events would take.
The future and survival
Like the characters featured in the film’s first part, Ukraine is going through a striking metamorphosis. A good example is a company near Kyiv that lost its wine warehouses when Russian troops tried to encircle the Ukrainian capital during the winter of 2022. Despite the war, the company saved and expanded its business and started opening new shops and restaurants. The burned bottles of wine with charred labels are featured at the company’s memory museum while the destroyed warehouses are under construction.
After we spoke with Pavlo Mahalas in April 2022, he joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces, serving as a saper. He ranked captain and returned home (discharged from the army) in 2024, where he started rebuilding his winery with his family’s help.
Georgiy Molchanov and his family decided to preserve the remains of the most recognizable missile sticking out from the ground at his vineyard. It became a symbol for the tourists visiting his winery. Molchanov’s family winery is a marker of local business development in the region, and it has received grants from international organizations.
Arsen Fedosenko, a renowned photojournalist who photographed for all Ukrainian wineries, joined the army as a soldier and military photographer from the first days of the Russian full-scale invasion. In June 2024, Wounded Land film director Roman Zajaс went to Kharkiv for a meeting with Arsen but was only a few hours late after the Russian bombing of Kharkiv killed him.
The stories of all characters are striking and dramatic, which motivated us to merge the film’s first part with the future stories, creating one epic documentary, Wounded Land (2021-2027), with footage of Ukraine’s victory, in which we believe.
