Renata Dzhalo was born in 1997 in Saint Petersburg to a Russian mother and a Bissau Guinean father. In 2021 she graduated from VGIK, where she studied in Alexei Uchitel’s studio of experimental cinema. Her debut feature-length work, the documentary film Lenechka, about composer Leonid Desyatnikov, received an award at the Message to Man IFF. She directed a play based on her own script, Vitya Needs to Leave, which was performed at the School of Modern Drama, House of Cinema and the 8/3 Stage. On This Land is her first experience in feature-length fiction filmmaking.