First Day

FIRST DAY is a fully immersive first-person VR experience that transports the visitor to the situation of the first day of the unexpected war attack. It allows you to experience the internal transformation that Ukrainians went through on February 24, 2022.

"We want to share the experience of the first day of the war with a wide audience who, like us, once did not believe that such a thing was possible in their lives. This experience is about what allows Ukrainians to resist today, when everyone expected that we would not last even 3 days. FIRST DAY tells about the inner transformation that we personally went through. About what allowed humanity to survive in the most terrible times of history - about helping each other, about one's own choice not to be a victim of circumstances, but to be someone who can help. We are not the first who had to go through this experience and, unfortunately, not the last," says project director Valeriy Korshunov.

The project is based on the stories of real people, in it you can see the houses of Borodyanka and Buchi, which were bombed by the occupiers. Together with a large number of artifacts of the war, they were scanned and further reproduced in virtual space.

Valery Korshunov, known for his projects about Chornobyl, began filming and scanning the consequences of the war in the summer of 2022, for preservation, memorialization, and the subsequent opportunity for others to visit these places in person, in virtual reality. Modern technologies already allow it to be done photo-realistically, so immersive projects are one of the most progressive directions of cinema.

FIRST DAY project became the winner of the 2023 Biennale Cinema College. The project went through several stages of selection and work with VR and film industry experts and mentors, as a result of which it received a grant for implementation and the opportunity to be presented at the 80th Venice International Film Festival in 2023.

"We are incredibly grateful to the Biennale Cinema College for the opportunity to implement and present the project about the war in Ukraine at the jubilee Venice International Film Festival. FIRST DAY is just the beginning of a big project that will memorialize our war and tell the stories of our people around the world. But it is very important, it will increase the level of empathy and understand us better, to see the history and destinies of the people behind each destroyed house," says Svitlana Korshunova, the project's producer.

It is known that Korshunov's team is also working on the VR Borodyanka, VR Hostomel, and VR Chornobyl projects, each of which will use different storytelling technologies and formats.