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20-year-old Alina is always on the move. She even spent some time living on the street when her parents went to prison – nowadays though she plays football for Kiev in Ukraine’s top league. Still, her living conditions make it crystal clear that you’re not going to get rich being a female footballer in these parts. Alina lives in her grandmother’s tiny apartment, along with her half siblings, six-year-old Renat and seven-year-old Regina, as well as their thoroughly disinterested father. Alina already cared lovingly for the two kids while her mother was still alive, and when she dies it is clear who is going to have to look out for them. Alas, money troubles increasingly dog the family, her football career, shaky as it already was, is suffering and her dream of making the national team is in danger of fizzling out.

This mixture of sports documentary and milieu study lays open the suburbs of the Ukrainian capital. One is able to gain an intimate sense of how hard it is for the young woman to be utterly shoved into adulthood by circumstance in a situation characterised by social extremes. With an extraordinary amount of empathy, Alisa Kovalenko captures the travails of a young woman attempting to reconcile personal passion with family and economic obligations.