In the summer of 2010, the residents of Donetsk eagerly anticipated hosting the upcoming European Football Championship. Beyoncé performed in the Donbas Arena, a new airport was under construction, and two Germans staged street theatre on the city’s central Lenin Square. Today, this metropolis in eastern Ukraine finds itself in the tenth year of war. Through biographies and travel accounts, the Ukrainian-German collective tells the personal stories of a city on the brink.

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Fourteen years ago, director Andreas Merz from Berlin travelled to Donetsk to stage a street theatre piece about the Donbas region - its Soviet past and its relationship with Germany. Today, the once-thriving and progressive metropolis lies at the epicentre of a brutal conflict. Separatists and Russian soldiers have turned the city into a military camp. The former participants of the street theatre production are now scattered across Europe, displaced and in exile. What has become of their dreams? How have they managed to rebuild their lives in foreign lands despite the upheavals in their homeland? How do they see their own future - and that of their city?

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Through the kaleidoscope of these diverse life stories emerges a portrait of Ukrainian society before and after the cataclysms of 2014 and 2022. The documentary theatre project Donezk.UA recounts the recent history of Ukraine and its people through the prism of personal narratives, giving a human face to the headlines that reach us from Ukraine almost every day.