Bucha: How one man, a Lithuanian Jewish man, saved over 200 Ukrainians and helped them escape the horror of war

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If it's difficult for you to understand the thick accents, click on the "cc" for closed captions. Although they are not perfect, it helps.

Bucha is a Ukraine-made thriller about the first phase of Russia’s 2022 invasion, told through the real story of Konstantin Gudauskas, a Lithuanian Jew born in Kazakhstan, who stayed in Bucha and used a Kazakh passport to pass Russian checkpoints and evacuate civilians. The film is produced and written by Oleksandr Shchur, who previously wrote comedy for Volodymyr Zelensky before Zelensky became president, and directed by Stanislav Tiunov. Tiunov shot on location around Bucha and the wider Kyiv region, using (real) captured Russian vehicles and, in some scenes, real Ukrainian soldiers at the checkpoints.

In this interview, producer and scriptwriter Oleksandr Shchur explains why he saw Gudauskas’s story as globally legible, a foreigner with rare access choosing risk to save others, while director Stanislav Tiunov describes the decision to recreate events where they happened to keep the film close to lived reality. Together, they argue that Bucha is not only a single town in Ukraine’s memory, it is a template for what occupation can look like across the country, and why liberation in the Kyiv region became a national turning point.

This is the link for Apple TV's listing of the movie: https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/bucha/umc.cmc.3iy4u10mn7n1t21v9v1jieslx