The New Yorker Documentary:

“Following Valeria” documents the life of a young woman who becomes a social-media star during the war in Ukraine.

Film by Nicola Fegg
Text by Anna Kordunsky

When Russian bombs struck Ukraine two years ago, Valeria Shashenok, a twenty-year-old aspiring fashion photographer, took cover with her parents in a basement in Chernihiv, a city north of Kyiv. They waited, restless and anxious, as Russian forces laid siege. In an effort to take her mind off things, Valeria made a series of TikTok videos, including a bomb-shelter riff on the “things that just make sense” trend, in which users share their lives’ mundane absurdities. She documented details of her life in the bunker—preparing meals on a hot plate, making coffee with a blowtorch—and on forays outside she filmed destroyed buildings and blast pits. Valeria channelled her anger into deadpan: an eye roll, a bewildered hand flick, a “what gives” headshake. In the early weeks of the war, Ukrainians found salve in dark absurdist humor. Her videos went viral; one amassed more than twenty million views in just three days. A week later, she decided to leave Ukraine and to join millions of other people fleeing the war.

When the documentarian Nicola Fegg came across Valeria’s videos, she found them “completely charming—and also really weird,” Fegg told me. “I couldn’t understand where her humor was coming from.” With that question, Fegg’s documentary “Following Valeria” was set in motion. Fegg first met Valeria in Warsaw, where Valeria disembarked from a train after two days on the road, tired and dazed but purposeful in cultivating her new social-media role. Fegg then tagged along as Valeria travelled across Europe, finding temporary homes in Berlin, Milan, and a village outside of Nuremberg, all the while continuing to document her life on TikTok. She never lost her sense of wry amusement at the whole situation, at one point comparing her pilgrimage to “Keeping Up with the Kardashians.”

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