“When they asked me what the war is, I answer without hesitation: its names.” — Maxim Daly, soldier-poet

Somewhere in the eastern part of Ukraine, a woman named Yulia is treating a wounded soldier. Her call sign is Cuba. She is a fashion designer by training, a combat medic by choice, and in the years covered by the documentary that bears her name, she is estimated to have helped save approximately seven hundred people. But she did not plan any of this…instead she planned Paris.

Cuba & Alaska has traveled from Sheffield to Sarajevo to Rome, collecting festival awards and growing its audience one screening at a time, while the war it documents continues without pause. It screens in Portland, Oregon, organized by Car for Ukraine’s Oregon Battalion, in partnership with DAWN Inc.

The two women at the center of the film are known by their call signs. Cuba is a fashion designer who studied couture and dreamed of Paris. Alaska (Oleksandra) is a painter, a journalist, and a person who, by her own admission, does not especially like people and would rather not be public. Before February 24, 2022 neither had planned to spend years doing battlefield medicine in the eastern part of Ukraine. Neither had planned to become a character in a documentary. Alaska agreed to be filmed largely because Cuba convinced her that the film might make Cuba famous, and that a famous Cuba could afford to buy Alaska a horse. (Alaska is still waiting for that horse.)

The film has traveled to Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and now Portland. Cuba has shown her fashion designs in Paris: a fashion line built on Ukrainian embroidery stretched into futuristic silhouettes, while concurrently treating wounded soldiers in field conditions. The simultaneity is both metaphoric and reflective of what her life contains.

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Yegor Troyanovsky directed the film. He speaks with the economy of someone who has learned, through years of filming in active combat, that the most honest things are usually the shortest ones. The film exists, he says, partly because he kept pushing when he could have stopped just as Cuba and Alaska still continue their work even after production ended.

Olha Bregman, producer of the film and co-founder of Kyiv-based 2Brave Productions, notes that when she and Troyanovsky first encountered Cuba and Alaska in the early months of the war, there were more than five thousand women serving in the Ukrainian military, yet almost no public stories about them. Women were not required to serve. They had chosen to. Nobody was telling that story, partly because the women doing it were not advertising themselves.

“It was obviously charismatic, so prominent,” Bregman says of Cuba and Alaska. “When you see them, you go — wow. Great characters. Let’s follow them.” Over time, the film had stopped being about what it is like to be a woman in a war and had become a portrait of what happens when a person decides that their skills are needed and acts accordingly.

I have sat with Ukrainian defenders in clinical settings, in field conditions, and in the spaces between the transit points, the rehabilitation wards, the silences that follow bombardment. What I recognize in Cuba and Alaska is something I have seen in every person who has chosen to remain inside unbearable choices and found a way to function within them by weaving purpose and meaning to light their way.

Viktor Frankl wrote that the last of human freedoms is the choice of one’s response to any given circumstance. Cuba articulates her response in her answer, offered in Q&A sessions at screenings around the world: if she is absent, someone may die who would otherwise have lived. It is a concrete and clear reason to return. Edith Eger, herself a survivor and clinician, wrote that the one thing that cannot be taken from a person is the freedom to choose their own meaning. Cuba has chosen hers.

Alaska’s answer is different. After everything she has endured, including a drone fragment that threw her ten meters and damaged her leg so severely she spent years in rehabilitation. Her reason for continuing is revenge. In the West this word often lands with discomfort. Sit with it longer and what it reveals is a person who has refused to absorb destruction as the final word. Revenge, in this register, is a form of insisting that what was taken had value worth answering for. It is, as Martin Seligman’s research on post-traumatic growth shows, one of the ways human beings reconstruct purpose after catastrophic loss, not despite the wound but through it, using the full force of what was broken as the energy of what comes next.

Ukraine’s military extends no special conditions to women: no separate quarters, no adjusted expectations. Cuba states it plainly in footage from the film: you need to be professional, you need to know what you are doing, you need to do it well, and you need to be responsible for your particular part. Nobody asks who you are. People judge only how well you do your work. Bregman spent three years watching this and came to a conclusion she did not expect at the outset. “In a war, it doesn’t matter who you are,” she says. “And so war makes everybody equal.”

The film has been compared, in some reviews, to Thelma and Louise, two women finding freedom together in a world designed to contain them. Troyanovsky accepts the comparison without objection. If it brings audiences into the cinema who would otherwise have passed on a film about Ukraine, he considers it useful. He trusts that once they are seated, the comparison dissolves on its own. It is, he notes, very difficult to romanticize a war with a film like this one.

What sets Cuba & Alaska apart from the crowded field of Ukrainian war documentation is that its protagonists laugh. They make jokes at their own expense and everyone else’s. They carry the specific texture of a friendship that has been tested past the point where most friendships survive. Cuba sometimes forgot she was wearing a GoPro camera. She was too focused on her work, and that unselfconsciousness is visible in every frame she shot.

Troyanovsky describes the weight of asking someone doing that work to also document it. “You feel like a stupid guy asking stupid things,” he says. Judith Herman, in her foundational work on trauma and recovery, identified testimony as inseparable from healing, to be witnessed is to be confirmed as real, to have one’s experience entered into the shared human record rather than absorbed in silence. The GoPro is a crude instrument for that work. In the setting where the women work, bringing in an additional videographer means creating an additional risk.

Bregman asks that anyone attending a screening photograph the audience. Cuba and Alaska like to see that people in different parts of the world are watching their story. It is the confirmation that the lives documented have reached someone, that the testimony has landed in people’s hearts.

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Ryan Johnson coordinates Oregon’s chapter of Car for Ukraine, a network that sources and delivers vehicles to Ukrainian units. He has no Ukrainian heritage, no family connection to the country, and has never visited it. He followed events loosely since the Orange Revolution, tightened his attention after the full-scale invasion, and raised his hand to start an Oregon battalion when no one else did. Before that he had been supporting Utah’s and Colorado’s chapters for months, waiting for someone in Oregon to step forward.

Ukraine, he says, is fighting on behalf of principles that do not stop at its borders, that an attack on a sovereign democracy is an attack on the architecture that makes all democracies possible. He notes that many American veterans are currently serving in Ukraine, which he takes as evidence that the sense of obligation that leads people into service does not dissolve when they leave it. Johnson himself has done AmeriCorps service, four years in search and rescue, and continues to volunteer with trail maintenance and disaster response. He worked for the federal government until last year’s cuts. He says, without apparent irony, that the economy is not structured to address the most important work that needs doing, and so people do it anyway.

Hannah Arendt argued that action, genuine action, taken in the world among other people, is what makes a human life fully human. The irreducible act of stepping into the shared world and doing something that could not have happened without you. Just like Johnson organizing Oregon Battalion of Car for Ukraine. And so DAWN’s work that now provided twenty-seven vehicles and millions of medical aid units. So is Bregman building a film company in the first weeks of an invasion because the invasion had eliminated whatever remained of ordinary risk calculus. So is Troyanovsky, who as of late 2024 set down his camera and took up a weapon, now serving in Ukraine’s special forces.

None of these people were supposed to be doing what they are doing. It showed the character and essence of people who stood up at Ukraine’s call, and continue to show up for her future.

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The footage Bregman returns to is Troyanovsky’s early material, Cuba and Alaska before the years of war had fully arrived in their faces. “When I met them the first time,” she says, “they looked so naive.” They were laughing, making jokes about everything including themselves. That footage, placed against what comes later in the film, is where the argument lives, visible in the difference between two faces across three years.

Bregman co-founded 2Brave Productions in Kyiv in 2022 alongside producer Natalia Libet. Every film the company has produced concerns the war: female experience, political accountability, education under bombardment, sexual violence committed by russian soldiers. The films have screened at Berlin, Rome, Tribeca, and Sheffield. Cuba & Alaska won Best Documentary at the Rome Film Festival in 2025.

Ukraine, Bregman says, stopped counting on outside help long ago and learned to count on itself. The film is an account, not a plea. Two talented young women with every exit available to them chose to stay and acted according to their values. “If this kind of story doesn’t motivate people around the world to at least think,” she says, “and also try to help, I don’t know what will.”

Most people reading this will never face what Cuba and Alaska face. But every person alive has stood at the threshold of something that mattered and found a reason to step back from it. The question this film leaves in the room long after the credits, long after the Q&A, and long after Portland. It is a simple one: what would it take for you to step forward?

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Cuba & Alaska screens on June 18, 2026, at McMenamins Kennedy School, Portland. The screening is organized by Car for Ukraine’s Oregon Battalion (50 States for Ukraine).

Yulia Brockdorf is a Ukrainian-born licensed psychotherapist, registered dietitian, and humanitarian. She is President and Co-Founder of DAWN Inc. She travels to Ukraine multiple times per year to deliver clinical care to defenders. She is co-author of a peer-reviewed article on drone-related psychological trauma and executive team member of Defense Tech for Ukraine community.

DAWN is a Portland-area humanitarian nonprofit that has delivered twenty-seven vehicles to Ukrainian defenders and provides medical and mental health support to the people of Ukraine.