- Hi, my name is Anton Ptushkin.

I'm the director of "Saving the Animals of Ukraine" documentary, and I'm about to tell you hopefully something interesting about this movie.

"Why did you want to make this film?

Why the subject animals or what inspired you to pick this subject?"

Well, frankly, I'm not a cat person or a dog person or a zoo activist or anything like that.

But I was kind of keen to animals because I filmed a lot outside of Ukraine because I used to be a travel blogger before the war.

And I realized that a lot of people, they just love to see animals on the screen.

Some, I dunno, cats, dogs, lions, whatever.

And when this horrible war happened, we saw a lot of footage of people trying to save their animals, pets, and we all were really touched by these footage.

And a lot of people from the West, they mentioned that, okay, that was surprised us, that people of Ukraine, they were so close to their pets.

And that was interesting discovery for me, and I realized that I want to show this war, for sure, but from slightly different angle.

"What were some of the challenges of making this film?"

War, it's still going on.

And this morning, like, literally two hours ago, that was a missile strike here in Kyiv with a hypersonic mist, and literally one hour later I came back to my office to record this interview.

So, that's what we as Ukrainians deal on a daily basis here.

But I remember in 2023, we had this really, really exhausting winter because of, again, Russian airstrikes on our critical energetic infrastructure.

And we ran out of electricity and was almost completely blackout.

And at the same time, particular in this office, I was editing, you know, this documentary with the help of my kind of small battery, and I remember, like, a huge and really loud generator of my neighbors, it was going, it was just running, and I was kind of triggered by this thing.

So, yeah, it was obviously, it's a hard thing.

And, you know, just listen all that stories from the people who suffered, you know, Russian invasion and listen the story about animals that suffer from starvation, from hunger that were killed.

Yeah, it's hard, but again, we are trying to commend, you know, this war.

So, this particular documentary is just another attempt to somehow document this war and atrocities not against humanity, but also against the animal world, which I find also real important.

"What do you hope, learn, or take away from watching the film?"

Well, actually, I don't like, you know, just to talk about takeaways or conclusions about this movie, but I think, in general, this documentary's about moral aspect of the war and relationships between human and animals and pets, and in a really stressful situation that just highlight some interesting traits of humans.

So for me, this documentary is not only about pets and/or animals, it's also about humans and some human traits, really important human traits.

"How has making this film change you?"

Again, it's really hard to talk about changing how this film changed me, because it's been almost two years since we started to film this movie.

And, you know, it's also been two years of war.

So, I think it, for me, it's really hard, you know, just to understand what's, obviously the war has a much bigger, a much stronger impact on me than a film.

But these two years for me is just another life.

What I can say that making this movie drastically helped me to maintain my mental state because, you know, you have to do something useful during the war.

Without that, you're just losing your mind.

So, in making this documentary, which I find really important job, and which I find really useful for sure, helped me a lot, you know, just to be more resilient.

You know, what is beneficial for making documentaries for such a long time, two years, is that a lot of your characters, a lot of your people that you are shot, their life changed.

Patron, the dog, he has found more than 500 explosive objects so far, and he even organized his old fund, Patron's fund.

And the main mission, this fund, is to help engineers, suppers, who lost their limbs, with the prosthesis.

And I believe it's 16 or 17 engineers that had got a treatment and had financial help from this fund, which I found real interesting.

Another interesting information is that the building that we were shooting two years ago in Baranivka, the building that were destroyed by Russian air bomb or rocket, and where Shaffa had been staying for 65 days straight without food and water.

So, this building was demolished by municipality because it was really kind of dangerous.

It could collapse in any moment.

And at this place, there is nothing at this place.

So, any sign that that was a building.

So, I'm really happy that we shot this building, because right now it's a history and, you know, it happens with this war that the traces of this war, they disappear really fast.

So, I mean, it's really, it's crucial, you know, just to catch the moment and to find time to shot something, because it can disappear in just in a days or weeks.

By the way, Asya Serpinska, she's the founder of Hostomel Shelter.

She retired, so she's 79 right now.

And she retired eventually.

And, right now, the director, the manager of Hostomel Shelter is her granddaughter.

So, I like the way this family, you know, just to continue to work with animals and help animals.

It's really cool.

And Asya Serpinska, she's a legend.