Shakhta, Potter, and Dancer were volunteers – ordinary Ukrainians who picked up weapons in 2014 when Russia’s war first tore through their country. For nearly two years, filmmaker Yuliia Hontaruk followed them on the frontline. Then the guns quieted, and the harder journey began: coming home.

Over the following years, the camera stayed close as the three men tried to find their way back — to their families, to themselves, to a life that no longer quite fits. Having accepted their own mortality on the battlefield before, they now face a far more difficult task: becoming alive again. But slowly, painfully, something like peace begins to take shape. Then 2022 arrived, and Russia’s full-scale invasion called them back.

To Die To Live spans twelve years of conflict and intimate observation. It is a portrait of an entire generation of Ukrainians, men who chose to fight, and who have spent a decade learning what it means to live. 

Delicate, life-affirming, and quietly devastating, this is a film not about war, but about what survives it. It shows how war penetrates people and becomes a part of them, how one struggles to find peace with death, and how unrelenting the desire for life ultimately is.