Dont ask me if I Killed
Helena Maksyom
Ukraine. 2026. 104 min
Don’t ask me if I Killed is Helena Maksyom’s personal record of the war in Ukraine, filmed over more than a thousand days. When the invasion began, she was a filmmaker with no experience of combat.
She volunteered, learned to treat the wounded, learned to fight, and, over time, became an officer leading others through the same fire that first consumed her.
Helena films when she can — between missions, during training, in the waiting that defines life at the front. The camera becomes both shield and witness. Through it she captures not the spectacle of battle but the texture of surviving it: the faces of those beside her, the exhaustion, the rare moments of laughter, and the quiet that follows loss.
The war repeats itself in cycles — new recruits, new fronts, new graves — and with each return to the line Helena grows harder and more lucid. Her bond with her mother, glimpsed during short leaves home, becomes a fragile thread to the world she once knew.
Through her eyes, Don’t Ask Me If I Killed becomes a meditation on endurance and moral gravity — on what remains of a person when the world forces them to fight in order to protect what they love. It is a film born from exhaustion and tenderness, a record of how humanity endures in the most inhuman of times.
