MTV To Air ‘Don’t Leave Me Behind’ Commercial-Free, Documentary On Teenage Ukrainian Refugees Traumatized By Russian War

deadline.com:

EXCLUSIVE: Russia’s nearly year-long war in Ukraine has claimed the lives of more than 7,000 civilians, including 438 children, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

But the impact of the invasion goes much further than those numbers, of course – the bloodshed has sent more than five million Ukrainians fleeing across the Polish border, reportedly half of them teenagers or younger.

Those traumatized Ukrainian teens are the focus of the new documentary Don’t Leave Me Behind: Stories of Young Ukrainian Survival, which will premiere on MTV on February 21, just days before the war’s one-year anniversary.

MTV is airing the film commercial-free.  “Filmmaker Nathaniel Lezra brings viewers just miles from the Ukraine-Poland border,” MTV said in a statement about the documentary, “where he chronicles the lives of Ukrainian teenage refugees as they process the unimaginable trauma of being displaced from their country and separated from their fathers fighting the war at home.” A pair of teens occupy the foreground in Lezra’s film – 18-year-old Oleksandra “Sasha” Kunitska and 15-year-old Daria “Dasha” Unger, “as they try to find normalcy in Poland – through volunteering work, mental health support, family and friendships – while maintaining hope for their families left behind, home country and their own futures.” A third central character, Ukrainian psychologist Ekaterina “Katya” Trofimenko, oversees a therapy group in which Dasha and other youths participate. “As the world marks the one-year anniversary of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, we sought to shine a light on the enormity of the human impact of this war, particularly among the millions of young people who have fled their