Film Screening: My Dear Theo

The Chair in European Intellectual History of the Munk School, Marci Shore, is pleased to collaborate with the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling of Concordia to invite you to the first screening of My Dear Theo (2025) with Alisa Kovalenko and Stéphane Siohan who will share their unique personal experiences from the frontlines of the war in Ukraine.

About the filmmakers

Alisa Kovalenko is a Ukrainian award-winning documentary filmmaker whose films are internationally acclaimed. In the early days of the full-scale invasion in 2022, she joined the ranks and fought in the Ukrainian Volunteer Army alongside the Ukrainian army. Eight years earlier, at the beginning of the Russian war in Donbass, Alisa had been taken captive by a Russian separatist unit. Her personal story, one of courage and resilience, provides an opportunity to reflect on contemporary Ukrainian history in a more intimate way.

Stéphane Siohan, Alisa Kovalenko’s partner, is a senior French reporter specializing in Central and Eastern Europe, based in Kyiv since 2013. He is the correspondent in Ukraine for the French newspaper Libération, one of the most experienced international reporters on Ukraine and the author of the first biographical essay in French on President Volodymyr Zelensky.

In 2014, Alisa Kovalenko, who was documenting the early days of the war in the Donbas, was taken captive by Russian-backed separatists and Stéphane Siohan headed to the occupied territories to rescue her. Since then, Stéphane and Alisa have been living together and working together on documentary film projects that chronicle a decade of history in Donbass and Ukraine at war. What Alisa survived during those days in captivity made her promise herself that if the war were to come to all of Ukraine, she would pick up a gun herself and fight. Eight years later, the war did come to all of Ukraine. And Alisa parted from Stephane and their four-year-old son, Theo, and joined a Ukrainian battalion. There on the front lines she filmed a video diary for her son. She wanted to show him the landscape “of beauty and death” — and to leave something for him if she were not to return : My Dear Theo.

Stéphane and Alisa worked for ten years, together or alternately, in Donbas and on the front lines of Ukraine at war. This screening, followed by a panel, will provide a rare opportunity to engage directly with individuals whose lives have been shaped by the full-scale invasion in deeply personal ways. Their willingness to speak candidly will provide invaluable insight into the lived realities of Ukraine behind the headlines.