Dancing Through the Ruins: Chechen Culture Doesn’t Die Under Bombs

In the fall of 2001, former prima ballerina Ramzan Akhmadov returned to Grozny to reform his troupe of child dancers, "Daymokhk" (Land of Our Ancestors), who had been scattered along the roads of exile by the war. In the ruined city, where the rehearsal hall was nothing but rubble, he managed to rebuild and train a troupe that would soon triumph in Berlin and Paris. "Daymokhk," he called it, was his way of protesting the war. As for the children, they felt very seriously invested with a mission: to show the world that culture doesn't die under bombs, that Chechnya is alive because it dances. The incredible odyssey of the children of Grozny, their pride, the beauty and power of their dances thus reveals, beyond the barbaric colonization and the cyclical war imposed on Chechnya by Russia, the essence of resistance: that of a culture which establishes the right of the Chechen people to exist. Directed by Mylène Sauloy