Directed by Academy nominee Simon Lereng Wilmont and Alisa Kovalenko, Girl Away From Home follows 13-year-old Nastia, an elite gymnast from Kyiv. After winning the Ukrainian championship with her tightknit group of friends, Nastia is forced to flee to Germany with her grandmother due to the war in Ukraine. In the unfamiliar town of Gelsenkirchen, Nastia must start over and cope with the uncertainty of whether she will ever see her parents and friends again. But when she joins a German gymnastics team, Nastia finds hope and begins to build a new life for herself. This moving story celebrates resilience, friendship, and the power of sports to bring people together.
Simon Lereng Wilmont has won numerous prizes, including Best First Appearance at IDFA with the feature documentary The Distant Barking of Dogs, and his two previous films The Fencing Champion (2014) and Chikara — The Sumo Wrestler’s Son (2013) both premiered at IDFA, won the Jury Award for Medium length Documentary and Best Short Children’s Documentary Award at the Al Jazeera Film Festival 2015. In 2022 Simon won the World Cinema Documentary Directing Award for A House Made of Splinters at the Sundance Film Festival. The same film also got him an Academy nomination at the 2023 Oscars. Simon Lereng Wilmont graduated as a documentary film director from the National Danish Film School in 2009.
A House Made of Splinters (2022), The Distant Barking of Dogs (2017), The Fencing Champion (2014), Chikara – The Sumo Wrestler’s Son (2013)
Alisa Kovalenko is a Ukrainian award-winning documentary director. She was born and raised in Zaporizhzhia, south-eastern part of Ukraine and studied documentary cinema at the Karpenko-Kary National University of Theatre, Cinema and Television in Kyiv and at the Andrzej Wajda School in Warsaw. Her debut feature-length documentary Alisa in Warland, a personal diary through revolution and war in Ukraine, had its world premiere at the IDFA 2015 First Appearance competition. Home Games, a social fairy-tale about the broken dreams of a young female football player, appeared at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2018 and again at IDFA (Best of Fests 2018). In 2021 Home Games was the first Ukrainian documentary acquired by Netflix. In 2018, Alisa directed and coordinated Beautiful Game, a 10-part documentary series commissioned by Current Time TV. Her latest documentary We Will Not Fade Away had its world premiere at Berlinale Generation 2023 and was nominated for the Berlinale Documentary Award.
We Will Not Fade Away (2023), Home Games (2018), Beautiful Game (2018), Alisa in Warland (2015)
