Amid the ruins of war and the ancient silence of the Vemmetofte Monastery in Denmark — a refuge for noblewomen since 1735 — a story takes shape in which music becomes memory, resistance, and breath.
Vita – Voices of Life and Victory is not only a portrait of the Ukrainian composer Victoria “Vita” Poleva: it is a journey into the voice of art, into the echo of those who continue to play even when the world trembles.
The very name Vita — Victoria, Vita — carries within it a double destiny: victory and life, fragility and strength. Fragility and strength coexist in her music, a reflection of her own life suspended between beauty and tragedy. Her music is born from this tension, from this unstable balance that transforms individual experience into a universal language.
Three women musicians become the protagonists of a dialogue that is both human and musical.
Elisabeth Holmegaard Nielsen, a pianist half Ukrainian and half Danish, begins her career at the Royal Danish Ballet but soon chooses music as the voice of her identity.
When Vita arrives in Copenhagen for a concert, Elisabeth accompanies her in discovering the city, guiding her through streets and symbolic places. From that meeting arises a subtle and powerful bond, made of notes and glances.
Zhanna Marchinska, a cellist, tells of a destiny shaped almost by chance. In Ukraine, as a child, faced with the choice between violin and cello — the only instruments available at her school — her mother directs her toward the cello, and she accepts that decision. That destiny becomes voice, depth, narrative.
Maryana Golovko-Danchenko, a singer, has sung since childhood. At four years old, her voice already lived within her; at sixteen, confronted with the cautious choice of studying finance, music imposes itself as necessity, urgency, light. Many who had heard her as a child continued to wonder why she had not pursued music: today her choice has become a mission.
The film intertwines with images of the invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022. Amid sirens and bombings, Vita thinks first of music rather than her own safety, worrying above all about hard drives and saved works, as if protecting music meant protecting her own life.
In the Vemmetofte Monastery, piano and cello resonate in a luminous hall. It is Tanka for Cello and Piano (2020): the piano descends into low notes and the cello vibrates in an uneasy tremolo. Vita explains the genesis of the piece but leaves the performers free to transform it into a living experience. Every gesture, every breath becomes an echo of history and soul.
The images move to the church of Stevns Klint, suspended above the sea: an extraordinary place where the singer tests her voice, between architecture and nature, between memory and the present. The song seems to dance with the waves, with the wind, with time itself.
Maryana speaks of the war, of nights in the air-raid shelters of Kyiv. The Passacaglia for Piano (1982), composed by Vita at the age of twenty for the death of a friend in the Afghan war, returns with renewed urgency: a piece written for a distant pain that today resonates in a nearby war.
In Ether, for piano, cello, and voice, the words of Aleksei Alexandrov become a message of resistance: no mountain can destroy you, not even against dragons and evil spirits. Vita guides and suggests, but leaves freedom to the performers: music becomes a living dialogue, an encounter between composer and musicians, between intention and interpretation.
A piece from 2019, composed specifically for Maryana, appears simple to the ear but reveals hidden depth: a musical talisman, created to protect those we love in the battles of life.
For two years Vita Poleva has been a fugitive. Yet her music has continued to travel: to Carnegie Hall, to concerts throughout Europe, finding new homes and new listeners. The film shows a powerful paradox: while the composer is forced to flee, her music crosses borders, builds bridges, and endures.
Vita – Voices of Life and Victory is not just a musical documentary. It is a meditation on the ability of music to give form to what history tries to erase.
When everything seems to collapse, notes become refuge. They do not save the world. But they save what in the world risks disappearing: voice, memory, life itself.
Danish musical documentary about the contemporary Ukrainian composer Victoria “Vita” Poleva.
Film directed by Torben Skjødt Jensen and produced by Elisabeth Holmegaard Nielsen, with the support of Nielsen Saloner.
Roberto Buono
