The Year That Never Ended
2023 · 33m · Ukraine
Directed by Anton Shtuka
Genres: documentary
Tones: darkly comic, tender
Young Kyiv comedian Vasyl Baidak joins a group of urban volunteers to rebuild the home of Iryna Terekhova, an elderly Orthodox Christian retiree in a Chernihiv-region village whose house was destroyed by Russian forces in March 2022, and an unlikely intergenerational friendship forms through the work.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A Kyiv comedian rebuilds a village retiree's home in a 33-minute Toloka doc, complete with the woman casually mentioning she sheltered next to Russian soldiers. That detail alone is worth the runtime.
Shtuka revives Toloka — Ukraine's communal barn-raising tradition — as bridge between Kyiv progressives and Soviet-era village elders, with Iryna's Russian-soldier basement revelation supplying the surreal note. Thirty-three minutes of necessary documentary.
33-minute Guardian doc that revives the centuries-old Toloka tradition as the structural through-line, with the offhand revelation about Russian-soldier basement-sharing as a surreal beat — that's the kind of detail you can't script and 41K views says it lands. Intergenerational comedian-retiree pairing is gold.
Reviews
The Year That Never Ended is a quiet gem that finds warmth, humor, and solidarity amid the wreckage of war, capturing a cultural revival as much as a physical rebuilding.