Netflix Doc ‘Camp Courage’ Explores War Trauma Of Ukrainian Girl – Deadline

At the beginning of the Netflix Oscar-contending short documentary Camp Courage, young Milana Abdurashytova takes out paper and makers and draws what she calls “a home of my dreams.” It’s a lovely cottage on a hill, with clouds dotting a sky of blue.

Her real home, in Mariupol, Ukraine lies in ruins like so much of that city and the country, pulverized by Russia bombs and shells. Milana and her grandmother Olga were able to escape Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 and take refuge in Slovakia. But escaping the trauma of war is another matter.

In the film directed by Max Lowe, Milana gets the opportunity to participate in a week-long camp in the peaks surrounding Piesendorf, Austria, joining other Ukrainian kids who have endured shattering loss from the brutal conflict. The camp is a project of the Mountain Seed Foundation, a nonprofit that describes its mission as “unleashing resilience in unconventional ways.”

“The impetus behind the camp is just really beautiful and inspiring,” Lowe tells Deadline. “A big component of the camp that they wanted to facilitate is addressing the trauma that all these families had recently experienced coming out of this war zone and now living displaced as refugees across Europe.”

Milana was just three years old in 2015 when her mother took her to the store one day in Mariupol. Russian-backed forces, who already at that point were attacking positions in Eastern Ukraine, shelled the neighborhood.

“Milana was found under debris, lying next to her mother, who was already dead,” according to a published account. “Luckily, the child was rescued by a passer-by.”

Olga says in the film of her granddaughter, “She went through a lot. So much suffering and pain.” She adds, Milana “lights me up and keeps me from falling into darkness.”

Milana has suffered both psychological and physical wounds. It is revealed in the film that she lost her lower left leg in the explosion that killed her mother. Lowe chose not to foreground her injury until about six minutes into the documentary.

“I never wanted that characteristic of Milana to be a focus of the film as much,” Lowe explains. “Obviously it’s part of her story, but we wanted people to see her for just the little girl that she is as she’s making her way through life. And the fact that she now is living with a prosthesis is part of her journey, but it doesn’t define her as I observed it, and her interactions with her grandma and how she interacts with the world, it doesn’t really slow her down, to be honest.”

As Camp Courage shows, Milana is excited about the prospect of scaling the mountains, at least in the abstract. On the way there, she says excitedly, “I want to climb them! So beautiful.”

But when it comes time to strap on gear for the ascent, Milana becomes frantic with fear and can’t go forward.

“She was totally capable of doing all those things,” the director notes. But “referencing my own experience, when you have had those sorts of experiences, those sorts of traumas like Milana has had, it becomes harder for you to push the edges of your comfort zone and it becomes harder to face things that are unknown to you.”

Lowe’s own experience bears closely on what Milana has gone through. The Lowe name is famous in mountaineering circles – Max’s dad, Alex Lowe, became one of the foremost climbers in the world. But when Max was just 10, his father was killed in an avalanche in Tibet. He explored the impact of losing his dad in the award-winning 2021 feature documentary Torn.

“For this to be the project that came to me right after Torn just felt very personal and very poignant,” Lowe says. “I wanted to go and help them tell their story like I had just had the chance to do for myself in Torn.”

But he proceeded carefully — again, based on personal experience.

“When I was a kid and Alex was killed, the news coverage was more traumatic than anything else, like the outside world wanting to peer in and capitalize on the drama of your loss,” he recalls. “I had that initial call with Olga and Milana to feel it out, basically. I didn’t want to force this upon them if they didn’t want to do this in any capacity. But I asked them straight up, this is going to be a journey, and we’re going to be in it together, and I’m going to be there with you, and do you want to do this? And they both said yes. And there was never a point where either of them ever felt like they’d pulled away from us.”

Lowe initially connected with the Mountain Seed Foundation when they approached him about screening Torn for all the participants attending the camp. The organization was founded in 2021 by Nathan Schmidt, a Marine Corps veteran who took part in ferocious battles in Iraq and suffered PTSD as a result. He found healing through experiences in nature.

“Nathan was able to process a lot of his own trauma in the mountains,” Lowe says. “One of the things that sold me about [Mountain Seed] from the get-go is you can tell that they were genuinely invested at a very personal level in making this happen and making it a positive experience for all these families because they knew the potency in that experience.”

Toward the end of the week-long camp, Milana and Olga got to see Torn.

“We weren’t able to translate it into Russian or Ukrainian, unfortunately, so it was just in English, but they were able to understand what was going on at a very intimate level,” Lowe says. “All the families were definitely hit hard by watching that film and me being there with them. After we screened it, Milana came up to me and gave me a big hug and just kind of wouldn’t let me go for the rest of the evening. She kind of followed me around. Without words, there was this understanding between us of this shared experience.

Lowe adds, “It made you feel like you’re in the right place, telling the right story.”