
Life in 9:16: Between Modeling and War
Tanya Chudnovskaia, Valeriia Karaman and Daniel Nikiforow leave Russia and Ukraine for Berlin, chasing careers as models with little more than a suitcase and a portfolio. Director and photographer Mehran Djojan follows them through castings, agency meetings and cramped apartments, capturing the grind of an industry built on rejection and appearance. Then Russia invades Ukraine, and the film shifts under its subjects: phone calls home turn into checks on whether family members are still alive, and ambitions built around runway shows and photo shoots suddenly sit next to war news and border crossings. Djojan keeps the camera close and observational, letting the three talk through their fear, guilt and homesickness without narration steering the story. The film stays a coming-of-age portrait at heart, tracking how young people improvise adulthood in a foreign city, but the war reframes every scene that follows, turning a modeling documentary into a record of how global events land on ordinary, specific lives.