This episode follows members of the Holland-based United Ukrainian Ballet Company, made up of dancers who were displaced from Ukraine in the fastest growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. CNN’s cameras capture intimate moments of dancers grappling with survivors guilt as their families remain on the front lines, all while remaining determined to fight for their culture. The pressure rises as they prepare to perform at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC – one of the most prestigious stages in a country with the power to determine the fate of their nation. In Kyiv, Amanpour spoke with dancers who have chosen to stay and perform at the National Opera and Ballet Theater in their home country, offering a brief respite from the war to audiences and defending Ukrainian culture from annihilation, even as sirens and air raid alerts ring out. The theater reopened three months after the war broke out and limited its audience to a fifth of its capacity – the maximum its bomb shelter can hold.
Emily Taguchi is a journalist and a documentary filmmaker whose work has been recognized with multiple Emmy nominations and a duPont-Columbia Award. She is currently the Series Senior Producer for National Geographic Explorer, overseeing the production of episodes towards the relaunch of the iconic series. She is also directing an episode following the eleventh-hour efforts to revive a functionally extinct rhino species.
Her most recent film, Asylum, chronicling the paths two Honduran fathers take on their search for refuge in the U.S., premiered at the St. Louis International Film Festival in 2020. Her previous film, After Parkland, follows the private journeys of families as they navigated their way through the unthinkable and rose to challenge the nation on gun violence. The film, which The Hollywood Reporter described as “intimate, sensitively made, and moving,” premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019 followed by screenings at Hot Docs, AFI DOCS, among others. In 2019, she and co-director Jake Lefferman were named among the “Ten Documentary Filmmakers to Watch” by Variety magazine.
