Directors Kantemir Balagov, Alexander Zolotukhin and Vladimir Bitokov were her fellow students.
Her feature-length debut Sofichka (film) [ru] was based on Fazil Iskander's novel of the same name and was released in 2016.
[10][11][12][13] The movie took the main prize at the Cannes Film Festival in Un Certain Regard in 2021 and received a distribution offer by Mubi streaming service.
[14][15][16] Kovalenko and fellow dissident filmmaker Kantemir Balagov were chosen as Telluride Film Festival guest directors in September 2022.
The script is co-authored with Russian writer Marina Stepnova, Alexander Rodnyanskiy's studio AR Content will produce the project.