Winner of Best First Appearance at IDFA 2020, this formally bold documentary traces a Kurdish-Ukrainian young man’s experiences of an endless cycle of war and peace.

Twenty-year-old Andriy Suleyman left one war zone to find himself in the middle of another. As a teenager, he escaped Syria with his family, taking refuge in his mother’s native Ukraine. His family is displaced across borders – a brother in Germany, an uncle in Iraq – and, now, he volunteers with the Red Cross. But Andriy’s dreams of a quiet life seem out of reach in a world where the tremors of conflict are as common as rain.

Shot in striking black-and-white by award-winning DOP Vyacheslav Tsvetkov, which magnifies the themes of grief, loss and disconnection, director Alina Gorlova’s latest film is a work of both notable beauty and inventive form that confronts the far-reaching destruction caused by every bullet and bomb. Intercutting narrative passages with sometimes elliptical but nonetheless affecting images, This Rain Will Never Stop is a sophisticated vision of war zones, both universal and intimate, and the scars they leave on humans caught in the crossfire.

“Absorbing … A brave and uncompromisingly artistic attempt to outline the contours of a much larger, perhaps species-wide soul sickness: the psychological and philosophical displacement that war churns up in its wake.” – Variety