Alexander Denysenko is a Ukrainian-Polish film director known for Before the Dawn and Wonderwall, and a protégé of Academy Award–winning director Andrzej Wajda and Oscar-nominated cinematographer Sławomir Idziak. Wajda wrote of his student’s “talent, sensitivity and unique vision.” Denysenko has won 59 international awards, and his films have been selected for 168 festivals in 37 countries. He has served on festival juries in Kraków, Paris, and London. Born in the USSR, he came of age in 1990s independent Ukraine, between the street, where might made right, and his painter father’s studio. He trained at the Wajda School in Warsaw and at FOCAL in Switzerland, then studied the Meisner technique to search for a living person’s truth on screen. He teaches acting and directing at the National University of Lviv and is a member of the Polish Filmmakers Association (SFP) and the National Union of Cinematographers of Ukraine. His films explore the moment a person chooses between someone else’s script for their life and their own voice; his doctoral research asks how films can widen the viewer’s choice instead of imposing an answer. In the Ukrainian folk song “The Sun Is Low Already,” sung for generations to endure pain, the heroine meekly accepts a cruel fate. In his film Before the Dawn (2025), she sees a way out – and, a moment before the end, chooses to live. Shot during Russia’s full-scale invasion, the film stars Kamila Urzędowska, a 2024 Berlinale European Shooting Star. It was nominated at the Berlin Music Video Awards 2025 alongside Sabrina Carpenter, Lady Gaga, and Drake. The ÉCU festival in Paris named it Best European Independent Music Video and called it “a tool of cultural diplomacy, giving global audiences a contemporary Ukrainian voice.” To the world, this war has become a story of pain, of life put on hold. On the eve of the shoot, Russia struck homes in Lviv in the invasion’s heaviest attack on the city. The crew had to decide: stop, or keep working. They kept working. Denysenko chronicled that choice in his documentary A Film About Choosing to Live (2025), winner of Best Documentary at the Independent Shorts Awards in Los Angeles. On camera, his mentor Idziak, Oscar-nominated for Black Hawk Down, praises the film for its “world-class visual precision.” The world knows Chornobyl as a symbol of fear and death. In his film Wonderwall (2018), a young man mourning his beloved enters the Zone and emerges ready to live and love again. Denysenko made the film in partnership with Chernobyl Children International, whose patron is Ali Hewson, wife of U2’s Bono. The charity thanked him, alongside Craig Mazin and Svetlana Alexievich, for shining a light on Chornobyl. Radio Svoboda (RFE/RL) called Wonderwall the only film in the world to speak about Chornobyl without fear and anxiety, but with the power of love. A Routledge monograph notes that it shows the Zone “in an entirely new interpretation: not as a space of threat and danger.” From the start, his films have been about choosing one’s own voice: in the music film My Passion (2010), a young heir whose life is mapped out for him discovers in one night what it means to live on his own terms. With this film, the then-unknown Lviv band Prime Time beat 6,000 competitors and shared the stage with Linkin Park. His films remind people who they really are – and give them back the choice.
