(IM)POSSIBLE TO STAY

Today, the liberated city of Kherson endures devastating Russian fire that claims lives and scorches entire neighborhoods. The Mykola Kulish Theater stands with boarded-up windows, its halls in a danger zone, and its stage transformed into a humanitarian warehouse. But this emptiness is only an illusion.

While the heart of the theater in Kherson beats in its basement—the sanctuary where citizens hid from heavy shelling and which became a resistance headquarters—part of the troupe in Kyiv prepares an eponymous documentary performance. This is the "Theater of the Witness," where actors need no scripted roles; they recount their own journeys of being the faces of pro-Ukrainian rallies, enduring house searches, interrogations, and the life-threatening risks of evacuation. Through these testimonies and raw footage from the frontline city, the audience experiences what it truly means to resist and face the daily agonizing choice: save your life or save your home?

Filmed in the summer of 2023, the documentary resonates with even greater urgency today. Following recent direct strikes on the theater building itself, "(Im)possible to Stay" is an honest attempt at a dialogue between those who fled and those who remained. It is a manifesto of the unbreakable people of Kherson, a story of those for whom art has become the ultimate line of defense.