We had been working on Yogis of Ukraine for nearly three months—and still, the We had been working on Yogis of Ukraine for nearly three months—and still, the promised financing never materialized.
📌 No one had been paid.
📌 We were all working for free.
📌 And we had a choice to make—keep going or walk away.
Then, an anonymous donor stepped in and offered to purchase a professional editing system for the film.
It was exactly what we needed.
🚀 Finally, we could begin shaping the footage.
🚀 Finally, we could start making the film real.
But there was one problem—we still had no money to live on while doing it.
The Hardest Decision: Keep Going or Let It Go?
The producer’s group met to decide:
💬 "Do we keep going, even without funding? Or do we stop?"
📌 The longer you work on a film, the harder it is to walk away.
📌 If I spent months editing without pay, leaving would be impossible.
📌 But how would I survive? How would I pay rent?
💡 The only way to raise money for a film is to have something people can SEE.
And the only way to do that was to edit the film first.
So we made a decision.
🚀 We would use our savings.
🚀 We would cut expenses in every way possible.
🚀 We would keep the project alive—no matter what.
How do you make a documentary with no money? A Year of Sleeping on Sofas and Cutting Costs
We didn’t realize what this decision truly meant.
📌 For more than a year, we slept on sofas and floors in different people’s homes.
📌 Instead of paying rent, every dollar went toward finishing the film.
📌 Survival became as much a challenge as editing itself.
At one point, I set up an editing room in a freezing basement—a space loaned to me by one of the producers who was in Europe at the time.
📌 No heat.
📌 Winter outside.
📌 Editing in a winter coat and sweater.
But I needed to be alone with the footage—to let it speak, to see what it wanted to reveal.
The Breaking Point: No Money, No Progress, No Hope?
One particular day, I hit a breaking point.
I was angry—furious, actually—about the lack of funding.
📌 I had a rough cut of the film.
📌 I was trying to fit in all the women I had interviewed.
📌 And I felt like I was stuck—creatively and financially.
💡 (I would later abandon the idea of including everyone—but at that moment, I was trying.)
Frustrated, I randomly opened an interview that wasn’t in the film yet.
🚀 I hit play—somewhere in the middle.
And the woman on screen said:
💬 "Why even I recently thought: ‘There is no money, there is no money!’ Well, in fact, everything you need, you have!"
I stopped.
💡 Everything I need, I have right now.
It was a lesson. A lesson about living in the present moment.
💡 A lesson I needed—but didn’t want to hear—while sitting in a freezing basement, trying to keep this film alive.
What Editing Yogis of Ukraine Taught Me
Looking back, I realize:
📌 The film was teaching me lessons while I was making it.
📌 I was learning resilience from the very women I was filming.
📌 I was being shown—again and again—that everything I needed was already there.
🎥 Filmmaking isn’t just about creating a story—it’s about becoming part of the story.
And Yogis of Ukraine was shaping me just as much as I was shaping it. This is how do you make a documentary with no money.
Final Thoughts: Why This Film Had to Be Made
This wasn’t just another project.
This was a story that had to be told—even if it meant:
✔ Sleeping on floors and sofas for a year.
✔ Editing in a freezing basement.
✔ Facing financial uncertainty every single day.
Because some stories matter more than money.
And this?
💡 This was one of them.