Our Team
Helena Maksyom & Adrian Pîrvu
Helena Maksyom and Adrian Pîrvu have been making films together since 2015. What began as research for a documentary about Chornobyl became a decade-long creative partnership, two feature films, and a body of work rooted in Ukraine.
They met while Adrian was researching a film about the long consequences of the Chornobyl disaster. Helena had no filmmaking experience at the time, but she had an instinct for people and a refusal to be dishonest. She became the film's principal camera operator, shooting most of its material, and ultimately its co-director. That film, Everything Will Not Be Fine, premiered at IDFA in 2020.
Since then they have continued to work together across features, short films and commissioned work, most of it in Ukraine, much of it concerned with the people a society tends to overlook.
Adrian Pîrvu
Adrian Pîrvu is a Romanian documentary producer and director based in Bucharest. His connection to Ukraine is not professional in origin. When the Chornobyl reactor exploded in 1986, his mother was travelling in Ukraine, pregnant with him. He was born blind. One eye was partially saved through surgery, and he has lived with severely limited vision ever since.
In the mid-2010s he travelled through Ukraine and Belarus to document the lives of other children of the disaster. That journey led him to Helena, who lives with a congenital spinal condition caused by the same accident. Their meeting changed the film entirely, and the result, Everything Will Not Be Fine, became a story about the two of them as much as about Chornobyl.
He co-directed and co-produced that film, and produced Helena's Don't Ask Me If I Killed (2026). He holds a BA in Directing and an MA in Film Production from UNATC in Bucharest. Alongside the films, he supports Helena's former unit, delivering aid and running the fundraisers that supply them.
Helena Maksyom
Helena Maksyom is a Ukrainian documentary filmmaker and reserve Captain of the National Guard of Ukraine. She co-directed Everything Will Not Be Fine and directed Don't Ask Me If I Killed, filmed across three and a half years of active service on the front line.
Beyond the two features, much of the work we have made together has been about disability, access, and the people at the margins of Ukrainian public life.
In 2021, with the Goethe-Institut and the Ukrainian organisation Atelier Normalno (Ательє Нормально), we produced and directed a series of short portraits of artists with Down syndrome.
With the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung we made a separate set of three films about accessibility in Ukraine, looking at the barriers built into everyday life and the people working to remove them.
We have also created content for Ukrainian human rights organisations focused on marginalised communities, among them Fight For Right (Право на права) and Bachyty Sertsem (Бачити серцем).
The soldiers Helena served alongside are still fighting. Right now they need encrypted radios.