Dancing Anyway

In 2014, Kyiv’s nightlife just stopped. When the Revolution came and the shooting started, the clubs closed, the energy died. Not peace—just absence. The kind of dead a city goes when nothing normal is happening.

Slava Lepsheev lost his job when the financial collapse hit after the war. Waiting for solutions wasn’t an option. So he started Cxema—not a registered club, nothing legal. He’d break into empty warehouses, basements, apartments, set up his equipment, and throw parties. Raw, hypnotic, relentless techno. The point was to dance.

Tom Ivin made a documentary tracking Slava and the crew. He doesn’t ask grand questions about the nation’s future or what resistance means. He just films young people in the dark, moving until sunrise, trying to feel something other than the weight pressing down. What runs through your head at 4 a.m. when the bassline is in your chest? Nothing. That’s the goal.

There’s something defiant about it that has nothing to do with politics or messaging. It’s people in an impossible situation doing the one thing left: moving, making noise, being together. Not celebrating. Not protesting. Just refusing to stop.

The film wonders what becomes of a generation like this, whether the country can even survive. But the real question is simpler: what do you do when the normal answers don’t work? You find a building. You break in. You dance illegally. You keep being alive anyway.

I never learned if Cxema continued or what happened to Slava after. But the scene stays vivid—dark room, bodies moving, the bass cutting through everything, the country falling apart above, and down there they’re still dancing anyway.