A Life Shattered by War

Oleh Stahanov was serving on the Eastern Ukrainian front when a grenade explosion left him gravely wounded. From the trench, believing he would not survive, he recorded a farewell video to his wife. He survived.

Directed by Viivi Berghem for Yle, this Finnish documentary follows Oleh from the moment of injury through the slow, painful work of rebuilding. The camera stays close, tracking not only his physical recovery but the psychological weight that lingers long after the wounds begin to heal. The people around him, his family, the medics and nurses who kept him alive, are drawn into the story too, their own lives altered by what the war has taken and left behind.

The film asks a quiet but difficult question: how does someone reassemble a life when the damage runs so deep? It does not offer easy resolution. Instead, it finds its power in proximity, in the specific details of one man's experience, and in what that experience reveals about the broader cost of armed conflict on those who endure it.

A portrait of survival that moves between the personal and the universal, this is documentary filmmaking with genuine emotional honesty at its centre.