Scars of Independence
«Scars of Independence» is a collective tale from the lands where the dream of maintaining a national identity and ethos has turned into a losing battle for international recognition.
Over the years, I have documented the lives of ordinary people in unrecognized states on the territory of the former USSR. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, these self-proclaimed countries went through civil and ethnic conflicts in order to defend the right to be called a separate state.
Thats how all memories of a previous life were destroyed here. The whole new generation was born in countries that don’t exist on world political maps. The economic and diplomatic isolation of these lands has been going on for few decades, and time seems to have stopped here.
The lives of people in unrecognized republics are very similar: memories of the past prosperity and hope for a future that cannot be planned. Locals say that they had a lot of time to study the only world that was accessible these years - their own culture and themselves.
The documentary project “Scars of Independence” made in Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria (2014 - 2019).
