When Spring Came to Bucha
Mila Teshaieva & Marcus Lenz / & / 2022
What happens when a chapter in a war comes to an end? Unsentimental account from Ukraine of the existential spring cleaning that awaits when a people return to their city, first besieged and then liberated.
We know what wars look like while they are going on. But what happens when the fighting stops? After 35 days of fighting and brutal attacks on civilians, Russian forces withdrew from the Ukrainian town of Bucha in March 2022, allowing its inhabitants to return to their homes, their lives and the grass that doesn’t stop growing just because there’s a war. But that was not all. There were rubble to remove, houses to rebuild, people to bury, lovers to wed and, most importantly, deep wounds to heal. ‘When Spring Came to Bucha’ shows us a side of the war we almost never see, and unsentimentally and soberly follows the enormous work of cleaning up and caring for the survivors.