“What remains when everything starts to falter? Maybe: a look, a face, a quiet moment of dignity. Earlier this year, I traveled through southern Ukraine with Action Medeor, a global emergency pharmacy that has been providing people with essential medicines for 60 years..
Between Odesa, Mykolaiv, and the surrounding villages, I captured photographs, film footage – and encounters that will stay with me. The result is an 11-minute film: ‘Faces of Ukraine – a Roadtrip’. It is a quiet journey through a fragile yet dignified present,” says Berlin-based photographer and director Frank Schemmann, who presents his project on GoSee.
“I travelled through what was considered a ‘safe space’, and perhaps that’s why people approached me without mistrust – with a remarkable sense of pride. And with an attitude that seemed to say: Look at what injustice is being done to us. I’d be grateful if you took the time to watch the film – and maybe share it with people who care about dignity and visibility as much as I do.”
“It was an incredibly intense week – full of encounters, impressions, and emotions. What stays with me is the people’s extraordinary warmth, their courage, their resilience.
In a youth and children’s center barely twenty kilometers from the front line, we met two 18-year-old girls from Germany doing a three-month internship there.
And the children… some loud and boisterous, as if trying to drown out the constant threat surrounding them; others quiet, their eyes lost in the distance. There are tears – many – but also laughter. Perhaps that’s the only way to endure when war has become part of everyday life.” Frank Schemmann
This 10-minute film is not a conventional report. It is a quiet journey through a vulnerable yet dignified present: portraits instead of headlines, journeys through landscapes and devastated places. A voice that tells without explaining. Music that carries, but never intrudes.
