Traces Review: What Happens After Women Speak

Iryna Dovhan’s work with SEMA Ukraine brings two difficult responsibilities into the same encounter: helping women find care and asking them to revisit experiences they have struggled to speak about. In Traces, these tasks sometimes pull painfully against each other. Nina’s shame makes seeking assistance difficult, even with other survivors prepared to support her. Her distress complicates the satisfaction of seeing testimony gathered. Before an account can become part of a public record, someone has to live through the telling, with needs that extend beyond what can be recorded.

Silence, here, has been actively enforced. Mefodiivna, a great-grandmother, recalls an attacker threatening to kill her if she told anyone, leaving a bullet to give the warning a physical presence. She still has it. The threat attempts to dictate her behavior long after the soldier has gone, making concealment part of the violence itself. Placed beside Nina’s difficulty seeking help, her account gives shame a political history. What may appear from outside to be a private inability to speak develops under conditions designed to make speaking dangerous.

Co-directors Alisa Kovalenko and Marysia Nikitiuk follow Iryna’s efforts to collect accounts of sexual violence committed during Russia’s war against Ukraine, reaching back to 2014. The middle-aged and older women they film disturb the association of sexual assault with youth and desirability.

Their experiences concern armed authority entering homes and claiming power over the people inside. Olha’s recollection of hearing her son tortured in another room exposes how that power spreads through family relationships. Walls divide the prisoners while sound makes each person’s suffering available to the others. Domestic intimacy becomes another means of inflicting harm.

The filmmakers respond with a significant division of their own, allowing the women’s voices to carry accounts while the camera attends to gardens, rooms, hands, and damaged surroundings. A face need not remain under inspection for every painful sentence. This matters because filmed testimony can invite an ugly scrutiny of behavior, as though grief must take a recognizable shape to deserve belief. The relative composure of a voice, or a gaze directed elsewhere, requires no correction here. The women’s words remain intelligible without the camera continually searching their expressions for visible confirmation.

Iryna’s garden is especially effective in this respect. Her account of abuse accompanies a place she cultivates, giving her an activity and an attachment that exist alongside what happened to her. The image makes no demand that growth should explain suffering. Tetiana touching bullet holes in a wall establishes a different relationship between a woman and her surroundings: damage remains within reach, part of a space she can still physically encounter. These passages hold the present and the remembered event together without making the women appear suspended inside the moment of assault.

The more overt symbols are less exact. A burning tree and a field of dead sunflowers offer legible images of devastation, but their meaning arrives largely complete. The garden belongs to Iryna’s continuing life; the bullet-marked wall has a specific relationship to Tetiana’s account. The symbolic landscapes loosen those connections, briefly making different experiences look like variations on the same wounded terrain. Their beauty can feel too readily available. The film’s closer attention to inhabited places and ordinary gestures gives the women greater room to remain particular.

Sound sustains the uneasy proximity of ordinary life and war. Rain, wind, low rumbles, and artillery occupy a world in which recollection has no secure distance from continuing danger. Wojciech Frycz’s strings and female voices lend passages an atmosphere of lament, while the environmental sounds keep that sorrow situated somewhere people still have to live. Kovalenko’s own experience of wartime sexual violence gives the project a personal stake, but the care of the filmmaking is clearest in these decisions about attention: what accompanies a voice, what remains visible, and how long a person must stay exposed to the lens.

As the documentary spends more time with SEMA’s organizing, the work of listening acquires practical consequences. Iryna visits women, records and transcribes their accounts, and helps them find medical and psychological assistance. Meetings, protests, and symposiums place those encounters within public advocacy. The shift from stiller passages of recollection to handheld observation of activity gives collective action a physical rhythm. Solidarity becomes a set of things people do for one another, requiring time and coordination. A woman’s willingness to speak can depend on someone first making contact and helping her understand what assistance is available.

The statements are intended to support war-crimes investigations in The Hague, giving the recordings a purpose beyond the documentary’s audience. That destination also reveals the distance between being heard and obtaining justice. Transcription preserves an account and makes it available for further use; it requires Iryna to attend again to words that were already difficult to receive. The film makes this repeated exposure part of its understanding of advocacy. Public visibility does not finish the encounter. Listening leaves responsibilities with the person who has agreed to listen, while the survivor’s immediate need for care continues alongside the longer demands of accountability.

Iryna’s cancer treatment interrupts a network whose activity has depended heavily on her availability. As she steps back, women she has supported begin taking on documentation and assistance themselves. This transfer gives the film’s collective dimension its strongest development, changing who can initiate contact and who carries the accounts onward. Their participation is heartening without making their previous suffering seem useful or necessary. It also requires the network to accommodate a reality that heroic portraits of advocacy can obscure: its members have bodies that need treatment, lives that require attention, and periods when the work must be carried by someone else.

Traces had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival on February 16, 2026, where it won the Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary. Co-directed by Alisa Kovalenko and Marysia Nikitiuk, the powerful Ukrainian-Polish documentary follows six courageous Ukrainian women who survived conflict-related sexual violence and torture during the war, chronicling their resilience, shared solidarity, and efforts to document human rights violations.

Full Credits

• Title: Traces

• Distributor: Stranger Film Sales, 2Brave Productions

• Release date: February 16, 2026 (Berlin International Film Festival)

• Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes (85 minutes)

• Director: Alisa Kovalenko, Marysia Nikitiuk

• Writers: Alisa Kovalenko

• Producers and Executive Producers: Olha Bregman, Natalia Libet

• Cast: Iryna Dovhan, Tetiana Vasylenko, Liudmyla Mefodiivna, Galyna Tyshchenko, Olha Cherniak

• Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Alisa Kovalenko, Oleksandr Roshchyn

• Editors: Nikon Romanchenko, Alisa Kovalenko, Milenia Fiedler

• Composer: Wojciech Frycz