Some stories don’t just stay with you — they change you.
This conversation is one of them.
Katya grew up in Mariupol, a city now synonymous with destruction and unimaginable loss.
Before the war, she had already built an extraordinary producing career across CEE, the Nordics, the UK and beyond — a life that changed completely from one day to the next in February 2022.
And two days before the full-scale invasion, she made a decision that still moves me deeply:
She flew back home. Not because it was safe — but because that’s where her family and friends were.
She had a sense of what might be coming, and she chose to be with them.
That kind of clarity… that kind of heart… it stayed with me.
In our conversation, she speaks with a raw honesty that humbled me: about waking up to war, the urgent effort to get her mother out of Mariupol, and the moment she realised her childhood home — and every physical memory of her life there — had been erased.
And in the middle of that devastation, she created Those Who Stayed — a wartime anthology held together by heartbreak, humour and humanity.
A project that exists because the Nordic public broadcasters acted fast, with a very special shoutout to YLE, national broadcaster in Finland, who picked up the phone, rallied their peers and said: “We have to do this.”
And because my former colleagues at Red Arrow (now Seven.One Studios International) believed in the project early and helped make the financing possible.
We talk about producing as an act of resistance. About burnout. About rebuilding her life in Brighton — behind a bar, in a yoga studio, reconnecting with life in its simplest, truest form.
And we talk about co-productions — not as budget puzzles, but as people. About protecting the emotional core of a story.
About her quiet strength and the wisdom she has earned the hard way.
There’s also the absurd, tender, unforgettable story of the Kyiv underground station where she spent the first days of the war — a dramedy she hopes to make one day. I hope she does too.
But the moment that will stay with me most came at the very end.
I asked her for one word to describe the year ahead.
She didn’t hesitate.
“Optimistic.”
Not out of naïveté. But out of strength. Out of choice.
Out of the belief that light deserves space too.
Please let her story be heard.
Listen — and if it moves you, help it reach others.
Unwritten+ has become deeply meaningful because of conversations like this.
I’m grateful for every guest who trusts me with their truths, their fears, their laughter and their lives.
They shape how I see the world — and I don’t take that lightly.
