When the war breaks out in Ukraine, Alisa is thrown into a life she wasn t expecting. Working as a translator for foreign journalists she meets British war photographer Anastasia, who chooses not to rush towards the front, instead observing quiet moments of everyday resilience - birthdays, picnics, weddings.
A unique friendship forms as the two women strive to collapse the emotional distance between “us” and “them”. Their bond deepens as war wounds them both —transforming this into a poetic meditation on closeness, distance, and what happens when war stops being a story about others.
Anastasia Taylor-Lind is a British/Swedish photojournalist and a poet.
For the past decade Anastasia has collaborated with Alisa Sopova, a journalist and an anthropologist from the city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. In 2023, she received the Canon Female Photojournalist Award for her long-term reporting from eastern Ukraine, and over 100,000 people visited her exhibition Ukraine: Photographs from the Frontline at the Imperial War Museum.
Anastasia is a National Geographic Society Explorer, TED Fellow, and 2016 Nieman Fellow at Harvard university. Her first book Maidan – Portraits from the Black Square, about the 2014 revolution in Ukraine, was published the same year. Her debut poetry collection One Language was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2022.
Anastasia has Masters degrees in photojournalism and poetry.
