Those who stayed: Netflix to show Ukrainian series about beginning of full-scale war

FILM.UA Group reported the information.

The series Those Who Stayed will be released on Netflix on November 1. It will have a simultaneous premiere in Ukraine and other Eastern European countries, such as Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, Moldova, the Baltic States, and the Balkans.

It consists of six episodes that reveal the fates of people at the beginning of the Russian invasion. The main characters include a mother who shares her life with her child and two husbands, one present and one past, a guy who found himself working at a zoo during the war, a homeless man who helps the Territorial Defense Forces, and others.

The series will be broadcast by national TV channels in over 12 countries, including Iceland, Australia, and France.

"Those who stayed is the largest co-production with other countries since February 2022. It is also the first Ukrainian project that was actually ordered by foreign channels and will be broadcast in Ukrainian," says Kateryna Vyshnevska, Development and Co-Production Director at FILM.UA Group and the project's producer. 

The series was filmed in cooperation with the national broadcasters of Sweden (SVT), Norway (NRK) and Finland (YLE). It was filmed in the spring of 2023.

During the initial stages of the show's development, FILM.UA Group collaborated with TV channels from Sweden (SVT), Norway (NRK), and Finland (YLE) as co-producers. The project was co-developed at the script level with the German company Red Arrow Studios International, which serves as the global distributor for the series.

Ukrainian artists joined the project: Oleksiy Yesakov and Tala Prystavatska, who worked on the Kriposna show, Artem Lytvynenko, the author of the idea and director of the series The Sniffer, and the author of Early Swallows Valentyn Shpakov and U Are The Universe’s Pavlo Ostrikov. The project is the first full-length work for Katya Tsaryk, the author of numerous music videos, concert shows and the short film Hug Me.

• The six-episode series will be broadcast on October 29 in prime time in Ukrainian with Finnish subtitles.