How Ukrainian artists channeled their creativity into documenting war

Art mobilizes against bullets, bombs and tanks successful “Porcelain War,” a documentary astir however quality not lone persists amid the wreckage of warfare but serves arsenic a indispensable existential limb of its own. The film, which won the U.S. expansive assemblage prize for documentary astatine the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, is competing for an Academy Award — drafting never-more-urgent absorption to the Ukrainian combat against invading Russian forces.

It’s the 3rd twelvemonth successful a enactment that a documentary astir Ukraine has been nominated, with “20 Days successful Mariupol” winning the Oscar past year. But arsenic the rubric suggests, this 1 hits differently. Its subjects are a mates — ceramicist Slava Leontyev and Anya Stasenko, who evocatively paints his palm-size creatures — and different painter, their person Andrey Stefanov. When Russian attacks escalated successful February 2022, their lives were turned upside down: Leontyev and Stasenko fled their Crimean location for Kharkiv, adjacent the Russian borderline successful northeast Ukraine, portion Stefanov apprehensively sent his woman and 2 daughters retired of the state for their safety.

The men took antithetic roles arsenic Ukrainian civilians donned camouflage to articulation the fight: Leontyev became a weapons teacher and Stefanov swapped his paintbrushes for a camera. Both began documenting their lives, successful and retired of strife, arsenic co-director and cinematographer, respectively, of this film. The project, however, had peacetime roots: Polish-born shaper Aniela Sidorska and American co-director Brendan Bellomo had primitively hoped to collaborate connected an animation task astir Stasenko and Leontyev’s folkloric miniatures. The warfare changed that.

“Slava truly felt that portion determination were truthful galore Western journalists that were telling an important perspective, it was from the outside,” Bellomo says, “and helium truly had this idiosyncratic communicative to tell, to truly effort to implicit that picture. And truthful we wanted to empower them to stock this.”

Artists-turned-documentarians Slava Leontyev and Anya Stasenk make folkloric miniatures.

(Picturehouse)

With the assistance of a unpaid network, the accumulation was capable to acceptable up assorted members of Leontyev’s portion with GoPro assemblage cams, camera drones and compact cinema cameras with which they changeable much than 500 hours of footage. “They would spell down into a bunker during their missions and, connected Starlink video, we would person a tiny class,” says Bellomo, who taught them indispensable filmmaking grammar. “They’re contractors, they’re IT professionals, doctors. They’re furnishings salespeople. They’re not nonrecreational soldiers. They don’t privation to combat a infinitesimal longer than they person to, but they’ve taught themselves to hole for this war, and they felt they could thatch themselves however to crook connected a camera amidst battle.”

Due to that process, “Porcelain War” features unsocial angles connected 21st period combat, arsenic camera drones observe equipped drones portion they hover supra a weaponry target. Meanwhile, the synchronized assemblage cameras seizure aggregate perspectives of soldiers moving unneurotic connected the ground. “There’s an incredibly deep, astir irony to the mode that they’re looking astatine their situation,” says Bellomo, who precocious joined Leontyev for a video conversation.

The endeavor besides proved an affectional boost for the soldiers successful the unit, which they telephone “Saigon” successful grant of “Apocalypse Now,” a corporate favorite. “It’s truly important for them to marque thing mean during the war,” Leontyev says. At 1 point, his commandant eased the artist’s doubts astir shooting video alternatively of bullets. “She answered me, ‘Now you person a much almighty and much impactful weapon: your camera.’ Personally, I ne'er thought astir the camera similar a weapon. For me, it was a caller brushwood for paint. But it’s truly the same, due to the fact that the totalitarian authorities is trying to instrumentality distant our escaped choice, however to deliberation and however to create.”

The communicative is paced by startling juxtapositions betwixt the carnage of destroyed villages and the peaceful earthy quality of the adjacent countryside.

Perhaps the boldest contrast, though, is however a locomotion done the woods tin pb some to a trove of porcini mushrooms (dutifully collected for the soldiers) and a onshore excavation (which Leontyev defuses with an unhurried hand). “You request to support calm,” helium says. “It’s a mode to survive.”

It’s the benignant of tone that made specified a analyzable and risky accumulation possible. “There’s this Ukrainian cognition of, ‘We’re going to fig it out,’” Bellomo says. “We’re going to fig it retired together.”

Happily, aspects of the planned animation task carried through, with mesmerizing sequences created by the Polish workplace BluBlu, accompanied by the keening melodies of Ukrainian taste fusion quartet DakhaBrakha, which donated its catalog for the accumulation to usage arsenic it pleased.

“It’s earthy for america arsenic artists to effort to look around, to effort to find thing absorbing and thing beautiful,” Leontyev says. “Animation gave america the accidental to archer astir the terrors of warfare without showing them similar the quality does, due to the fact that quality gets old. And we filmed each angiosperm oregon each stream oregon each idiosyncratic arsenic if it was the past time they exist.”