Reflections on the Russian-Ukrainian war in Ukrainian cinema.
The article was commissioned by Kino Raksti and was first published on February 24, 2023. The origial text in Latvian is available at the link.
By and large, little has changed in the general aesthetic principles of visual art since Michelangelo noted that in order to create a sculpture, one needs take a block of marble and cut away all superfluous things. Let’s jump almost half a thousand years ahead, in our modern and completely different world – and now, in contemporary discussions about the nature of cinema, we find the refrain: “To make something visible one must leave something out. Visual production is always a more or less conscious process of reduction, which is never merely or strictly technical”[1]. The author of these words – the German director, curator and publicist Florian Schneider – calls to protect reality from the perversions that appear when trying to imitate broad surfaces, instead of focusing on their structures and re-producing them in all the complexity of contexts. This danger of perversions is especially acute when we are talking about movies about war. After all, an author of such a film also takes responsibility for mapping a “route” through the war, determining its sides, reasons, chronology and, finally, the context. So, it becomes important to define not only what gets on the screen, but also what stays offstage, what is cut off.
February 24, 2023 marked one year since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A year ago, Russian missiles attacked Kyiv, Kharkiv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and other cities almost throughout the territory of Ukraine, destroying primarily civilian infrastructure. A week before, on February 16, 2022 Reuters broadcasted a live stream directly from Kyiv’s Independence Square in anticipation of the beginning of the full-scale war – which caused a number of jokes in the Ukrainian segment of the Internet. Either way, this full-scale invasion has a clear date and its visual signifiers – many videos that have already become almost iconic signs of this phase of the war.
In 2014, when Russian military forces occupied Crimea, no one was ready for the word “war”. Footages from protests with Ukrainian flags in Simferopol faded away among some naїve general uncertainty in the country that had just got rid of the corrupt and brutal regime of Yanukovych. The only visual signifier to the fact that the Russian-Ukrainian war began in February 2014 was the Russian medal “For the Return of Crimea”, dated by the 20th of February, which is perhaps the first public evidence of purposeful military aggression and violation of the territorial integrity of Ukraine by Russia. Already a year later, in 2015, Putin himself admits the military intervention in Ukraine and the military seizure of the Crimean Peninsula in the propaganda TV film distributed by the state channel “Russia-1” – “Crimea. The Way Home”.
In Ukrainian cinema, 2014 brings the beginning of a new wave – brings the source for new thematic focuses, brings new names of filmmakers and gives an impulse for audience‘s interest in national cinema. Due to the political and military upheavals, the basic questions like “who are we?”, “what is our history?”, “what unites us?” have become acutely important – the stories that the directors have brought to the big screens over the past nine years expressed and reflected experience and feelings of the majority of viewers both in Kyiv and Odesa, in Lviv and Kharkiv. And, of course, it is natural that many of these films were devoted to the war – its various episodes, which together form a kind of cinematic route through the history of the Russian-Ukrainian war: from its beginning in Crimea in 2014 to its modern phase, which continues nowadays.
In 2019, Odesa International Film Festival held the premiere of the feature film U311 “Cherkasy” (dir. Tymur Yashchenko, editor Viktor Onysko, Ukraine, Poland, 2019, 102 min.) that depicts the true events in Donuzlav Bay in March 2014 during the military seizure of Crimea by Russia. This festival version of the film was edited by Viktor Onysko[2]. The events of this film mainly take place on the board of a sea minesweeper called ‘Cherkasy’, which, together with 12 other Ukrainian ships, had been completely blocked by Russian military forces in Donuzlav Bay on the western coast of Crimea in March 2014. And it was ‘Cherkasy’ that resisted the Russian occupiers for the longest time, despite the fact that they actually only had water in their arsenal. In addition to the truly impressive story of the strong spirit of the ship’s crew, this film touches on several very painful factors of the context of that time. The military forces of Ukraine at that time were soaked with the Soviet model of hierarchical relations, which gave rise to bullying and hazing (didivshchyna). The characters of the film – young guys who entered the military service on ‘Cherkasy’ as sailors – suffer from an exploitative attitude and generally unacceptable conditions for service and life. All this, alongside literally rotten food and the figure of an arrogant cook, who had been eventually thrown out overside while the ship’s crew was establishing a new order on the board, creates on the screen persistent references to perhaps the most famous propagandistic naval action film of the Soviet Union, Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein.
However, in contrast to the Soviet cult story about the class struggle, U311 “Cherkasy” becomes a story of the gaining of subjectivity as such – of the break with the past of the rotten Ukrainian military system and with the past of the illusion of joint strategic development with the Russian army, of the awareness of the beginning of the war and responsibility for decision-making. Because, under the circumstances when former Russian colleagues turned out to be occupiers, and part of the own team of the ship turned out to be traitors, no orders came from the Kyiv command to the crew of ‘Cherkasy’. In March 2014, Ukraine did not have a president[3], the army was almost destroyed by previous governments that saw no sense in it, and no one in Kyiv wanted to take responsibility for any orders to the Ukrainian Navy in Crimea. After a number of unsuccessful attempts to contact the silent headquarters in Kyiv, the commander of ‘Cherkasy’, captain 1st rank Yuriy Fedash (performed by Roman Semysal) tries to coordinate a joint defense with other ships of the Ukrainian Navy blocked in Donuzlav – however, it is also unsuccessful, since many other crews have already surrendered, having neither a combat arsenal, nor – sometimes – simply a desire to resist[4]. In the end, ‘Cherkasy’, without having either orders from Kyiv or fire support, resisted the Russians with simple jets of water. On March 25, the minesweeper, which remained the last uncaptured Ukrainian ship in Donuzlav, was captured by the Russians who used helicopters and speed boats – their assault lasted more than two hours.
The editor of U311 “Cherkasy” Viktor Onysko is a famous Ukrainian filmmaker. With the beginning of the full-scale invasion in 2022, Viktor joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine – in particular, he took part in the liberation of Kherson Oblast, it is only a few hundred kilometers from my hometown of Odesa, where I am currently writing this text in 2023. I owe my freedom, in particular, to Viktor – since the Ukrainian flag flew over Kherson again, the shelling of Odesa has decreased. On December 30, 2022, Viktor died in the battles for Soledar. He left 9-year-old daughter Zakhariya and his wife, film curator Olha Birzul, whose tireless efforts have helped many Ukrainian films to receive their international screenings and financial support. Viktor’s death is a colossal loss for Ukrainian cinema, for friends and colleagues of this family, which no one will ever be able to heal. The strongest Ukrainian cultural potential is being physically killed today – just as it was a century ago during the colonial oppression conducted by the Russian Empire on Ukrainian lands.
Like any act of speaking, any story, any film – even (or more than anything else) a documentary one – is ultimately a product of the author’s formulation, definition and establishment of cause-and-effect relationships. After all, every even documentary shot, every cut, every character in the frame and every comment are ultimately the result of the author’s choice. Already at this point, it is worth coming to terms with the fact that any film about war is the result of someone’s conscious reduction, that is, someone’s choice: what is important to tell, and what can be left in the shadows. Obviously, this process is always quite political – and more than ever when it comes to war.
This should mean that every even documentary film about the war is not an objective panoramic cast of reality, but rather is someone’s political will to tell one or more of the possible stories about the war, cutting away others. Will to determine the beginning and end of a particular story. The Russian-Ukrainian war has been going on for nine years, and it is the largest war that takes place almost live – every day a large array of videos and images is being produced, some of which are being reproduced in the media, while others are getting quickly lost in digital archives. The beginning of the full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022 was almost expected by media that aired live streams and by their audiences. However, from which video, from which image does the count of the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2014 begin? From which date? How to build the history of the nine-year war, which has an endless array of videos and images captured by its participants, witnesses and victims, but does not have a conventional visual beginning? In other words, is it possible today to tell about the war in such a way as to simultaneously outline its panorama and reproduce its structure, its chains of contexts – to simultaneously reproduce its scene and give voices to thousands of its participants?
In a certain attempt to find an answer to this question, one of the most large-scale documentaries about the Russian-Ukrainian war, to watch the war (film found on the Internet) (443 cinematographers, Ukraine, 2018, 312 min.) unfolds. In the attribution of this work, it is not without reason that an incredible number of cameramen are given instead of the classic director figure – since both this figure and the person responsible for editing remain anonymous. This daring documentary experiment, signed by no one, was born and continues to exist on the Internet – in public access on YouTube, probably without any other screenings.
At least, a curator who would dare to organize the theatrical premiere of this film would first have to puzzle over the negotiating licensing rights for it – because the film consists of hundreds of amateur recordings that their authors once put on the Internet. Hours of video evidences of the war in eastern Ukraine – the beginning of which is determined by the amateur video of the seizing of the Slovyansk police office by FSB colonel Strelkov-Girkin’s squad on April 12, 2014.
The shaky camera of someone’s phone searches among the houseplants on the windowsill, looking for the most convenient angle to film the events in the yard of the house directly opposite theirs; off-screen, the worrying voices of camerawoman Valia and her companion are cursing the Russian militants, who use UAZ-bus to tear the security bars out of the windows of the police office, and discuss which city to flee to. On this very night, the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine will decide on the start of the Anti-Terrorist Operation, which for years to come will become synonymous with a much simpler, shorter, but sharper word – war. This decision, as well as the explanation of the legal grounds for using such Aesopian word construction, will remain in the shadows and will not be included in the film. Instead, the very scene of the war in all its obviousness and complexity will consist minute by minute of videos of 443 anonymous cameramen-witnesses and participants of the war – civilians, Ukrainian soldiers, volunteers, Russian mercenaries, collaborators.
Alongside the difficulties of negotiating licensing rights for theatrical screenings, such a found-footage wartime stained-glass film has the much more difficult challenge of navigating its route through this mass of footages. In simple terms, how to structure all these testimonies and what ideological position will be eventually crystallized from this. After all, in a conversation about war, it is impossible to avoid political responsibility for defining the sides of the conflict – and therefore it is impossible to remain ‘somewhere in the middle’ or on the sidelines: when a narrator talks about a war, consciously or not, a narrator takes either the side of the whites or the side of the blacks. The very act of talking about a war simply cannot be neutral – this condition is laid down at the level of language itself, at the level of act of speaking, level of words that we need to choose.
In the same way, a film about war cannot be depersonalized and ‘objective’. Clearly understanding this, the author(s) of to watch the war add to this five-hour documentary canvas quite modest comments about the inevitability of personal responsibility both for each shot and for the entire story about the war in the film. So, at a certain moment, a title appears on the screen stating: “the camera is taking part in the events.” On the one hand, each of the 443 cameras has its own trajectory of looking at the war – for example, when the very opportunity to record events in one or another point of eastern Ukraine becomes determined by the ideological position of a cameraman(woman). On the other hand, the camera itself becomes the symbolic blade that makes the first cut – cutting off from the depths of reality those episodes that now visualize the war, episodes which are being included in the film, leaving in the shadows many other episodes that have been never recorded.
But this is all – the first ‘step’ in creating this documentary film about the war. The following is actually a mapping the route, a building the story from these heterogeneous, sometimes ambiguous testimonies – the story about those who attack and those who defend themselves. Another title on the screen states: “three main situations of war: the launch of a projectile, the side view of shelling, the consequences of shelling. it is impossible to combine all three situations in one frame. this requires the editing. editing is a privilege. war videos exist in an unedited space. they are the substrate for television and our fears. who is the author? who is the director? the one who clicks the camera button? the one who launches the projectile? the one who posts videos on the internet? the editing has been going on now for 4 years.” Could the authors of the film have guessed then that those four years are only the equator of the war before Russia starts destroying lives and cities throughout Ukraine?
In any case, in order to subordinate this many-hour-long ‘substrate’ to their story about the war, the author(s) not only determine the sequence of video evidences: from the footage of the seizing of the police office in Slovyansk by the Russians in April 2014 at the very beginning of the film, and up to the smoky field landscape with credits that list cities of eastern Ukraine, which by the moment of online-releasing of the film in 2018 were under the Russian occupation, at the very end. Alongside this, in order this sequence of recordings made by amateurs on different sides of the front line was ultimately subordinated to the author’s responsibility for the story, in order the editing as a political decision actually took place, at a certain moment of the film the audio and video tracks split and no longer correspond to each other – thus depriving all recordings of their original ideological message.
“for all who are dead” – appears on the screen at the end of this five-hour film experiment. Dead are the main thing that remains in the shadow of this attempt to talk, visualize and watch the war – an ambitious attempt to build a surface, a panorama of the war scene, while focusing on the structure of its context, on the testimonies recorded by its direct participants and witnesses.
Another movie that is also dedicated to dead is Iron Butterflies (dir. Roman Liubyi, Ukraine, Germany, 2023, 84 min.). This investigative documentary is dedicated to all the victims of a particular episode of the war – the downing of the Malaysia Airlines passenger plane on scheduled flight MH17 by Russian controlled armed forces with the Russian missile. Actually, the film begins with the reading of the names of the victims in the Dutch court in the Schiphol complex. Off-screen – as well as off this list – remains almost everything that fulfilled small universes of all these people: where did they live, who they worked for, who they studied for, what they dreamed about, for what reason they flew on this flight, who was waiting for them, etc. However, only one thing is known for sure about these 298 people – they became victims of the Russian-Ukrainian war, because on July 17, 2014, Russian mercenaries, seeing a plane in the sky over Donetsk region, mistook it for a Ukrainian plane and fired a missile at it from the Russian Buk air defense system. The iron butterflies in the title are the butterfly-shaped shrapnel elements that fill the warhead of this missile. They were found in the bodies of the dead pilots. And it was them that Russian propagandists speculated about, inventing a schizophrenic lie about the inconsistency between iron butterflies and the holes in the plane’s skin and about the usage of animation technologies to create fakes against Russia.
The investigation of this tragedy reveals the two main tools of war, which the Russian invaders try to ideologically hide or justify: lies and violence. If the second thing is an obvious fact – and the director tactfully holds back from excessive immersion into the emotional depiction of the horror of the plane crash itself – then the question of the lie becomes one of the main leitmotifs of the film. Liubyi weaves together numerous documents in order to build, step by step, not only the story of the catastrophe itself, but also the war scene on the background of which this tragedy is unfolding: amateur video recordings of witnesses to the downing, Ukrainian Security Service’s interceptions of phone conversations between Russian mercenaries, satellite images, the plane’s route on Flightradar website, and reconstruction of the movement of the Buk air defense system from Kursk (Russia) to Donetsk region on Google Maps, etc. In contrast to to watch the war, Iron Butterflies keeps the original ideological charge of the found footage – amateur video authors cheer for the “DPR”, looking into the clouds of black smoke left after the just shot down plane; smiling Russian mercenaries are taking pictures against the background of the remains of the plane; the hosts of Russian TV channels cheerfully report that “DPR militia shot down a Ukrainian plane.” In the end, all this material found on the Internet subordinates by itself to the Liubyi’s political narrative about the war: because soon the militants will realize their ‘mistake’ and will start panically discussing it on phone calls, having discovered that the Buk has already been taken back to Russia; the same Russian TV hosts will start to declare, that the passenger plane could not have been shot down by the weapon at the disposal of the “DPR rebels”, forgetting their recent stories about the omnipotence of the Russian air defense system; and the witnesses – the residents of Donetsk region – will fall silent under the pressure of Russian mercenaries. “Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence,” the judge quotes Solzhenitsyn at the Schiphol hearings.
Violence – the middle name of war – like invisible missiles destroys lives far from the front lines. The documentary film In Ukraine (W Ukrainie) (dir. Tomasz Wolski, Piotr Pawlus, Poland, Germany, 2023, 85 Min), which has its premiere this in 2023 at the Berlinale in the Forum program, becomes a kind of journey through Ukraine after the full-scale invasion. Moving from the western cities of the country, through Kyiv and to Kharkiv, the filmmakers are also mapping a route deep into the experience of the war. From simply observing the consequences of the war on the streets – to living through it together with Ukrainians. During air alarms and explosions, during joint lunches in a bomb-shelter and in ambushes with Ukrainian soldiers in the forest. At a certain moment, an impressive shot appears on the screen – a newly formed dense grove of Ukrainian flags waving over fresh graves at the cemetery. A dense grove of unknown broken stories, which has been compiled into anonymous statistics every day.
This anonymity is the ultimate quintessence of war, which destroys even the mention of someone’s life, dreams, aspirations, plans. Even the names – as if they never existed. Probably, some of the most terrible shots from the Russian-Ukrainian war we saw were from Bucha and the mass graves in Izium – where, at best, the graves received nameless numbered crosses. This threat not only to die, but to disappear, to dissolve under anonymous unidentified numbers, to become erased from existence, – this contains the deepest black colors of war. In her documentary We Will Not Fade Away (Ukraine, France, Poland, 2023, 100 min.), which also got its world premiere in 2023 at the Berlinale, Alisa Kovalenko follows five teenagers from the city of Zolote and the village of Stanytsia Luhanska in the Luhansk region. Before 2022, both settlements were under Ukrainian control – however, the war during the previous eight years always loomed here as a noticeable threat. The lives of the film’s protagonists – children who are just beginning to plan their future – are soaked with the invisible presence of war. The songs they write, the jokes and conversations they hold, the dreams – in one way or another all of this contains the imprint of the war. One of the biggest fears that these teenagers are trying to overcome is not having time to live their life, not becoming someone. An expedition to the Himalayas becomes for them a way to get rid of this anonymity, which the violence of war brings just a few tens of kilometers away from them.
Currently, while I’m writing this text, both settlements are under Russian occupation. The film’s end credits include, among other, those characters with whom any contact had been lost since the full-scale invasion. The director herself, Alisa Kovalenko, stopped her work on the film after the February 2022, since she joined the volunteer unit of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and spent four months at the front line.
The cold destructive hand of war will not let go even those who survived, escaped, returned from the front. The best hopes of millions of people are focused on the fact that the war should end, the aggressor should be punished, the destroyed cities should be rebuilt. But the truth, which many witnesses, victims and soldiers are also aware of, is that the war will continue to steal their lives long after the last shot has been fired. The film No Obvious Signs (dir. Alina Gorlova, Ukraine, 2018, 64 min.) documents the life of a soldier after returning from the eastern front to Kyiv – but it turns out to be neither joyful nor triumphant, as it can be expected. Contrary to popular stereotypes, even the main character, the veteran in this story is not a man.
In 2022, with the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the role of women in this war was already much more obvious than 4, 5, 6 years ago. However, in 2018, when this Alina Gorlova’s film was released, female names from the front lines have never got enough of the media attention. Along with other projects called to change such an imbalance, in 2017, the documentary almanac Invisible Battalion by Alina Gorlova, Iryna Tsilyk and Svitlana Lishchynska was released – the film project, dedicated specifically to women at the front, to particular six participants of the ATO: Olena Bilozerska, Oksana Yakubova, Andriana Susak, Daria Zubenko, Yuliia Paievska and Yuliia Matvienko. However, even the gender marking in titling positions infiltrated the Ukrainian military discourse at a more or less official level only in 2021, when the Verkhovna Rada added “and female defender (zakhysnytsi)” to the name of the holiday “Day of the Defender (zakhysnyka – male defender) of Ukraine.”
This social invisibility of the work of the deputy battalion commander Oksana Yakubova, the protagonist of the film No Obvious Signs, with whom Alina Gorlova continued filming since the time of the almanac Invisible Battalion, after coming back home from the front line is multiplied by the invisibility of trauma, of ‘scars’ that war leaves on a person. “Problems that started… Are that I came to my office, where I worked before the war, and I can’t communicate with anyone,” tells the woman to the doctor, “I don’t know what to talk about. I began to cry a lot – although I had not cried at all during the three years of the war. I cry simply for no reason – from the flood of memories. Memories of the boys who were there, who stayed there.”
The problems of soldiers’ adaptation to the peaceful life after their experience of war still mostly remain in the shadow. The modern world, under the significant influence of bright Hollywood movies or video games, is oversaturated with the opposite, heroic images of freedom and independence defenders – these are supposedly restless people who cope with physical injuries and of course with a mental state. At the same time, the very war also pushes mental health to the periphery: the first thing that many instructors of first aid in armed conflicts say is that “health problems are problems of a living person.” Therefore, when human blood is constantly pouring around, sleeplessness or panic attacks seem less important. The words “no obvious signs” from the title of the film, is a common phrase used by doctors to close work with their military patients – if there are no physical, visible abnormalities in the body, then there are no problems.
“These two months that I am sitting in Kyiv are two months of real hell,” Yakubova tells another psychologist, “That is probably why I agreed to the shooting in this film – so that those who are going to war understand its price.” The war drains life day after day, month after month, even after demobilization. Terrible stories experienced at the front line, images of bodies that cannot even be recognized, deaths of people with whom you live side by side – all this catches you up hundreds of kilometers away from the battlefields, in a peaceful city during the once usual civilian life. And alongside the fact that the horrors of the war do not let go from their cold tentacles, remaining invisibly and constantly present nearby, they push a person into the isolation, loneliness – they build an invisible barrier to a peaceful life. One often returns from the front line not in the shining armor of the hero, but in a bubble of loneliness.
The collapse of the entire previous peaceful life – now as completely physical destroying – is being captured by the camera of the Lithuanian director Mantas Kvedaravičius and his partner Hanna Bilobrova in Mariupolis-2 (Lithuania, France, Germany, 2022, 112 min.). The city, which the director shot in 2015 for his previous documentary film with the similar title, turns into ruins. Mantas returned to Mariupol at the beginning of the full-scale war. The Russians had already bombed the drama theater, killed hundreds of people, the city was under siege under literally non-stop shelling. Explosions in the film are the constant sound that can hardly be called simply as the background. Their volume cannot be ignored, but you have to get used to it – the director’s camera almost doesn’t get distracted by shellings, local residents also continue to adapt their everyday activities to new conditions. Polis, as a community that seven years ago stood up and continued leading a peaceful life over the abyss of the war, has now crumbled into small groups of people who gather around the still-surviving buildings, where one can spend the night and cook dinner on the street. The church, which temporarily hides a few dozen citizens, prays and thanks God for another day of life – but even the church will soon ask people to leave its walls, fearing, apparently, to repeat the fate of the drama theater. “I have no place to go – my house is destroyed” – the answer of an elderly woman hangs in the air.
War smashes cities into a heap of stones, and rolls civilization back to the animal world. Mantas Kvedaravičius, a few days after the filming that we see on the screen, was captured by the Russians, who had already occupied the city, and killed. His body was found by his partner Hanna Bilobrova – the occupiers threw him out into the street, apparently after the murder, since according to the woman’s testimony, there was no blood around the Mantas’s body, and there were no holes in his outer clothing from a shot in the stomach.
The director still manages to catch the beast’s gait on his camera. Elementary everyday needs, which humanity has learned to satisfy with comfort, in an instant become critical problems, which go down with their ancient roots deep into animal life. A couple of men, stepping over the corpses of the dead, take out a generator from a destroyed house, where the frozen bodies lie right on the doorstep – a scene that makes blood freeze. Dignity and the right to burial simply do not exist in conditions where warmth and electricity become privileges.
How to return to a peaceful life after that? How to rebuild destroyed buildings, under which so many people died, where to look for hope? How to write poems and search for poetry?
The last two feature films of Valentyn Vasyanovych are dedicated to the post-war time. The main character of the Reflection (Ukraine, 2021, 125 min.) military surgeon Serhii (performed by Roman Lutskyi) returns to Kyiv after being in the Russian captivity. Having survived tortures of Ukrainian prisoners, which the director reconstructs on the screen with cold slowness and details, having witnessed unpunished murders, the traces of which the Russians burn in mobile crematories, the protagonist tries with difficulty to adapt to his former civilian life, to restore relations with his wife and daughter, to regain the warmth of human relations. In Atlantis (Ukraine, 2019, 106 min.), events unfold in the near future – in 2025, when the war has finally ended. In the film, Ukraine has already returned its occupied territories by that time – but they are so ruined by the war, so broken and devastated that they are no longer suitable for life. The main character is a former soldier Serhii (performed by Andrii Rymaruk, a non-professional actor, veteran, former intelligence officer), who suffers from post-traumatic syndrome. In attempts to adapt to a peaceful life, Serhii joins the humanitarian mission ‘Black Tulip’ whose purpose is to locate and to exhume the bodies of the dead. In this bitterly cold future, archeology only becomes important as a skill that is useful for excavating burials. After all, Serhii meets Katia (performed also by a non-professional actress, paramedic Lyudmila Bileka) – through the director’s discreet view, their relationship gradually gives rise to warmth and cautious hope for a better future.
Maksym Nakonechnyi shares a similar, devoid of rosy expectations, view of post-war life in his debut feature film Butterfly Vision (Ukraine, Croatia, Czech Republic, Sweden, 2022, 107 min.), which has its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022. The main character, a military aerial reconnaissance officer of the volunteer battalion Lilia with the call sign Metelyk (Butterfly) (performed by Rita Burkovska), returns home after several months of captivity. Her mother, beloved man, and friends are waiting for her. However, restoring relations with them, as well as returning to the former civilian life, turns out to be a difficult challenge. After being tortured and raped in captivity, Lilia discovers that she is pregnant. During the director’s quite sharp depiction of the problems of social rehabilitation for military veterans, it is revealed that a life, which is conceived under the war, can rather be given to the next generation, to those who won’t know this war. And its current participants, victims and soldiers will forever remain on it, returning to the battles again and again.
After all, no one can guarantee that even the next generation will not have to fight for their life and freedom. The war launched by Russia against Ukraine in 2014 is not the only one – it is not the first in Ukrainian or world history, and obviously not the last one. It has been raining for a long time – and the rain is not going to stop. In her full-length documentary film This Rain Will Never Stop (Ukraine, Latvia, Germany, Qatar, 2020, 103 min.) Alina Gorlova touches upon the wider contemporary context and depicts the infinity of war as such, connecting two different countries engulfed in flames of battles – Syria and Ukraine. And in the tender short film Peace and Tranquility (dir. Myro Klochko, Anatoliy Tatarenko, Ukraine, 2022, 12 min.), the narrator Andriy Bondarenko, telling simply the story of only his family, comes to a similar conclusion: peace is a short-lived privilege, which cannot be guaranteed to any generation. “Que sera, sera” – sings Doris Day in the film of Klochko and Tatarenko, as if signifying the inevitability of wars or the insecurity of peace.
***
As far back as 1965, Hannah Arendt came to an extremely alarming conclusion that the lesson of the Second World War had never been learned – and justice for Nazi criminals had never raised a victorious flag. Will we see justice for Russian war crimes? Will there be Ukrainian films in the coming years about rebuilding a peaceful life, about the poetry of civilian everyday life that doesn’t contain the shadow of war? When I think about these questions, I can’t get away from the obsessive association. The British Museum in London houses the so-called Standard of Ur, a Sumerian artifact of approximately the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. It is almost a rectangular box, which on both sides has plates decorated with mosaics – scenes from the life of the Sumerians. The artistic way of documenting life at that time engraved scenes of war on one plate, and scenes of peacetime on the other. The role of this object is still not clear. One says it could have been a box for collecting money – first for the war, then for civil or religious works, then again for the war, and so on in a circle. And one also says that the Sumerians are the earliest known civilization and one of the longest-lived.
[1] Florian Schneider. Reality Must Be Defended. – Berlin Documentary Forum 2. Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2012. – p. 45 [back]
[2] A little later, this film was released in Ukraine with a different montage, which focused more on the spectacle than on ideological accents and the context of 2014. [back]
[3] After Yanukovych fled the country, on February 22, 2014, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopted the resolution “On self-withdrawal of the President of Ukraine from performing his constitutional duties and setting early elections of the President of Ukraine.” However, early presidential elections took place only three months later – on May 25, 2014. All this time, Oleksandr Turchynov was acting President – he was elected as the Speaker of the Parliament also by the Verkhovna Rada on February 22, and on the basis of this resolution, he was appointed to perform the duties of the President of Ukraine starting from February 23. [back]
[4] Many of servicemen of the Ukrainian Navy in Crimea betrayed the military oath and joined the Russian army – among these collaborators was, for example, Rear Admiral Denys Berezovskyi, who betrayed only one night after being appointed to the post of commander of the Navy of Ukraine. [back]
