Written in the first four months of the war in Ukraine, fuelled by anger towards mindless violence, Nemec’s stories tackle the present moment and confront what really matters at times of abundant destruction. A Czech man in Ukraine in search of his alter ego. A gang of homeless kids driven from a cellar by tenants using it as a shelter from the war. A German couple who ‘rented a womb’ in Ukraine, whose child is now stuck in Kyiv. A teenager partnered with a Valkyrie for the distribution of lavash in besieged Mariupol delays his flight until it is too late. A Russian academic mounting a protest in the center of Moscow dressed in a costume from Swan Lake. They may not be soldiers at the front, but for the characters in these stories, life will never again be as it was before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In this collection of short stories—two set in Ukraine, two in the West, and one in Russia—Czech author Jan Nemec has produced a work of remarkable immediacy.

Jan Nemec, enfant terrible of the Czech New Wave, directs this starkly surrealist drama telling the brutal story of two Jewish boys who escape from a train transporting them from one Nazi death camp to another. As the boys run through the rugged and unfamiliar terrain, hounded by a band of armed German villagers, their flight is interpolated by their dreams, hallucinations, fantasies and memories.