Stop-Zemlia | 2021 |

If you don't dare, you'll never know. Navigating the emotional turmoil of waiting for life to begin while hanging around with classmates - a radical, authentic, and sensitive insight into the unsettling feeling of being young and an inside perspective on Ukrainian youth. Hanging out with friends, smoking too much, spinning bottles and kissing, making mistakes, playing, refusing to accept, dreaming with open eyes – life as a teenager can be overwhelmingly beautiful and difficult at the same time. Introverted 16-year-old high school girl Masha sees herself as an outsider unless she's hanging out with her two best friends, Yana and Senia, who share her non-conformist status. While trying to navigate through her last year of school in Kyiv, Ukraine, Masha falls in love in a way that forces her out of her comfort zone. In her debut, Ukrainian director Kateryna Gornostai composes a deeply emotional and multi-layered portrait of a generation whilst seamlessly flowing between the fictional and the documental. Appropriately, the film's title refers to a game that means "Stop-The-World". These kids don't want to get off, they're just looking for the right place to get on. Altered Innocence has been dedicated to releasing LGBTQ & Coming-of-Age films with an artistic edge since their inception in 2015. With a library of features and shorts from around the world, mixing genre with art-house and everything in between - Altered Innocence is committed to curating an esoteric library that is without peer in the current marketplace. Altered Innocence stands with the youth of Ukraine during this awful unprovoked conflict and will be donating $1 for every copy sold of Stop-Zemlia to the Voices of Children charity that works in Ukraine to protect children and rehabilitate them from PTSD resulting from this conflict: https://voices.org.ua/en/