One of the crucial sources for this work is the anonymous five-hour documentary To Watch the War (2018), a piece of found-footage filmmaking in its own right. Letter to a Turtledove is thus a second-degree artistic appropriation of amateur footage shot during the war in the Donbass region of Ukraine, recombined into a surreal anti-war film-poem. The war videos are interspersed with Kavelina’s own animated segments, staged mise-en-scènes, and archival footage of the Donbass from the 1930s (when the region became a hotspot for Stalinist industrialization of the Soviet Union, and of heated class warfare) onwards. 

There’s an actual poem at the film’s center: a monologue spoken off-screen, authored by Kavelina herself. This piece of writing encapsulates the multitude of traumas, grievances, horrors, dreams, and hallucinations that have descended upon the Donbass region since its invasion by Russia in 2014. Still, numerous elements of this multitude originate from long before the war had actually broken out.

Letter to a Turtledove was acquired by MoMA in 2022 and included into MoMA exhibition "Signals". 

It can't be that nothing that can be returned (2022) is Dana Kavelina’s science fiction video about a utopian future world.

The citizens of the future try to understand why the violence took place before and create a comprehensive computer model of history. To restore the lost equality of the past and the future, they decide to resurrect all of those who had died in russia’s war against Ukraine.

The only way to heal the wounds of those they have brought back to life is through prolonged collective grief. Thus, they start collecting traumatic memories and sharing these experiences throughout society.

The video is shown in a place that looks like the headquarters of future activists: the room is full of banners and placards, one of which reads, “Resurrection for everyone”.

One video channel shows people talking about a certain monument that was presumably erected to memorize the Catastrophe, but their speech falls apart, and we cannot compose a single image of either the monument or the catastrophe that happened to these people. Their speech is too desintegrated, their evidences get confused, their memory slips away, and the catastrophe remains dissolved in the air, like the city that appears on the screen in the form of fragments washed away by rain. On the other video channel, a person interacts with monuments, exploring the possibilities of juxtaposing her body and the stone bodies of historical catastrophes.

The film is a work on the thesis developed by Zhenya Belorusets: “animals have no fate”. The film consists of series of images that always appear on the borderline between human, non-human and animal. Hybrid creatures of the abstract, somewhat posthuman space of the film try to find salvation in motion, in each other or in a crutch objects, prosthetic objects, which are sometimes both an attraction and torture for the wearer, a hope of salvation and a prison. The film explores situations of fatality, absurdity and hope.

The experimental film explores the intersection of utopia and concentration camp, a space where they cast shadows on each other and drown in indistinguishability, in which the lightest and darkest points of the historical coordinate line merge. The work is a disturbing misrepresented testimony of victims, a space of fantastic and impossible historical justice, the last judgment of prisoners over the jailers. Based on documentary chronicles provided by the United States Holocaust Museum, monologue and animation by the author.

Stop-motion animation, that tells a story of an older man, who has to flee from Donbass because the war breaks out. His family is going through hardships, but still Mark Tulip looks for a way to cope with loss and find a place for his garden.