Director Yeva Strielnikova’s Ukraine war drama, Stay Online, has released a trailer before its premiere on July 22. The film will be shown at Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival.

The film is set in Ukraine after the invasion of Russia in February of last year. The film follows Liza Zaitseva, a young woman volunteering in Kyiv. Thousands of people were given a laptop, including her, by Ukrainians to support war efforts. She was asked to install sensitive military information and provide the computer to her brother, who is fighting on the frontline. Her journey is interrupted when she gets a video call from a young boy looking for his father, the laptop’s last owner, who went missing when the Russians killed innocent civilians in Bucharest. Liza decides to take on the challenge of finding the boy’s missing father, a challenge that could cost her her life and her family’s.

Mama Production, AMO Pictures, and OUP Fiction produced the film. Stay Online was written by Strielnikova and Anton Skrypets. Skrypets and Anatolii Dudinskyi, Maryna Kvasova, and Alla Lipovetska are also producers. XYZ Films will handle the sales in North America.

The film utilizes a Screenlife format, using a character’s phones or computer screens. This was first brought up by Skrypets and explained to be more realistic because most people see the war through social media, phones, and computers.

Stay Online is based on one of the events in Bucha, where about 400 civilians were massacred. Production started four months into the war, and the psychological strain of war challenged them as they lived through these real-life events.

Strielnikova hopes the film will be watched globally to bring more attention to the war so that the Ukrainian people are heard and seen.