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Scenery, a joint venture with Banijay Benelux, today announces it is partnering with Sarah Jessica Parker’s Pretty Matches Productions on Front Row, a feature-length premium documentary following a group of talented Ukrainian ballet dancers, produced in collaboration with Banijay Rights. The Emmy-award winning producer and actress will serve, alongside The Ruderman Foundation, as Executive Producer with Scenery (Human Playground for Netflix) producing.

Front Row is directed by Miriam Guttmann (multi-award-winning director of Seeds of Deceit) and is represented globally by Banijay Rights, the global distribution arm of media and entertainment powerhouse Banijay.

In this extraordinary feature, Guttmann follows a group of Ukrainian dancers in exile, as they form a new ballet company, ‘United Ukrainian Ballet’. While performing Alexei Ratmanskiy’s version of ‘Giselle’ in Washington D.C., Alexis, one of the leading ballet dancers, befriends Oleksandr, a front-line soldier, who lost both his legs in battle on the Ukrainian border with Russia. A friendship forms and Oleksandr is welcomed into the rest of the ballet company. Subsequently joining the ballet company, he remains even more determined to dance with his disability.

A tale of adversity, the devastation of war remains evident through video calls between the dancers and their families back home, contributing to a deep sense of survival guilt among the dancers, especially given Oleksandr’s condition. Through collaborative choreography and performances, the Front Row, and the front line, symbolically merge, emphasising the strength and resilience of everyone involved.