Don’t Ask Me If I Killed is Helena Maksyom’s personal record of the war in Ukraine, filmed over more than a thousand days. When the invasion began, she was a filmmaker with no experience of combat. She volunteered, learned to treat the wounded, learned to fight, and, over time, became an officer leading others through the same fire that first consumed her.
Olena films when she can — between missions, during training, in the waiting that defines life at the front. The camera becomes both shield and witness. Through it she captures not the spectacle of
battle but the texture of surviving it: the faces of those beside her, the exhaustion, the rare moments of laughter, and the quiet that follows loss.
The war repeats itself in cycles — new recruits, new fronts, new graves — and with each return to the line Helena grows harder and more lucid. Her bond with her mother, glimpsed during short lives at home, becomes a fragile thread to the world she once knew.
Through her eyes, Don’t Ask Me If I Killed becomes a meditation on endurance and moral gravity — on what remains of a person when the world forces them to fight in order to protect what they love. It is a film born from exhaustion and tenderness, a record of how humanity endures in the most inhuman of times.
Helena Maksyom is a Ukrainian documentary filmmaker and reserve officer of the National Guard of Ukraine. She graduated with honors from the National Aviation University in Kyiv with a Master’s degree in Ecology and Environmental Protection, and has worked across media and film as a journalist, translator, writer, project manager, cinematographer, and director.
Her feature documentary debut, Everything Will Not Be Fine (2020), co-directed with Adrian Pîrvu, premiered internationally at IDFA and received multiple awards, including Best Ukrainian Feature Film and Best Director at the Odesa International Film Festival, as well as further international prizes and nominations, including at the Romanian Film Awards.
Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Maksyom volunteered in evacuations and humanitarian operations before enlisting in the National Guard in 2022. She served on active duty until 2025, reaching the rank of Captain, and took part in several key military campaigns, including the liberation of the Kharkiv region, operations in the Luhansk region, and battles around Bakhmut and Pokrovsk.
Alongside her military service, she continued to document the war from within. She is an alumna of the international documentary program ESoDoc and continues to work at the intersection of cinema, testimony, and lived historical experience.
