Art-making during wartime in Ukraine – The Hollywood Reporter

“Porcelain War”

Courtesy of the Sundance Institute

Watch Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontiev’s documentary Visually Confident and Intellectually Insecure Porcelain War It’s like listening to a recitation from a brilliant poet while someone sits next to you and whispers what the poems are actually about. And the person sitting next to you explaining what the poet is trying to say is…toy…the poet too!

There is a great deal of beauty in Porcelain War There’s strong artistry behind it, but I’ve never seen a documentary with so many visual metaphors and so little faith that the audience will be able to understand them. It’s a bit astonishing and a bit insulting all at once. Its often leaning toward the former explains it taking home the top prize in the American Documentary Competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

The documentary is the story of Slava (co-director) and Anya, partners in life and art. He creates ceramic objects – snails, reptiles, owls – and covers their white surfaces with intricate, whimsical paintings. They live in Crimea, surrounded by artists and friends, but when the Russians attack, instead of fleeing their homeland, they go out of the country to Kharkiv, a city just 25 miles from the Russian border.

In Kharkiv, Anya and Slava continue to make their art, placing their ceramic figurines amid the rubble, while at the same time Slava works as a weapons instructor for a military squad of civilians who are now forced to take up arms against the Russian invaders. The artist couple is also accompanied by their bouncy dog ​​Frodo, a terrier of sorts, and a very good dog.

The third (or fourth, if you count Frodo, which is really a must) member of their little community of artists On the verge of death He is their old friend Andrei Stefanov, a painter who turned his attention to photography during the war, when he was not lost in thought about his wife and daughters, who had fled to Lithuania.

The artist’s responsibility to continue to produce art in the darkest moments, and the ability of art to add beauty and joy in that darkness, are just a few of life’s undercurrents. Porcelain War.

Art, as the documentary makes clear and reiterates, is itself an act of rebellion and a creative act to ward off destruction. It’s hard to dispute that contention, and the directors and Stefanov, the documentary’s lead cinematographer, do a poignant job of depicting the contrasts between the rural countryside and the ruins left by Russian bombing in urban centers.

The documentary moves back and forth, often in sharp clips, from activities like a mushroom hunt in the woods (or just Frodo skipping across sunny fields) to the harsher realities of war. Except that both are real, as we can see when one of their ceramic owls is placed on the crumbling city wall or when Frodo almost comes across a mine on one of their walks.

But can war – at least from a defensive position when what you are protecting is your generational homeland and all that you hold dear – be an act of creativity and art? This is a complex thesis that Porcelain War He dances while not necessarily adhering to it.

The necessity of fighting against the Russians is never in doubt for the furniture sellers and dairy farmers that Slava trains. Once the mutiny occurs anyway, we see Anya drawing one of their bomb-equipped drones.

Drones have become an important part of vernacular documentary in the past decade, demonstrated in numerous shots in which drones film war-making drones. That one makes art and the other contributes to the carnage (no matter how righteous) is a conversation Porcelain War Induced without direct treatment. Perhaps the filmmakers are hoping to avoid questions about whether or not they explicitly view this as Ukrainian propaganda, or just a story.

And you know that if the filmmakers felt comfortable making the subject clear, they would, because the documentary is very clear in making things clear on many points. Just as if you, dear reader, heard porcelain described as “fragile, but durable” in a documentary about Ukraine, I bet there’s a connection you’d be able to make without Slava’s voiceover popping up saying: “Ukraine is like porcelain, easy to break, but impossible “Destroy it.”

It’s all in Porcelain War He is a metaphor, including little Frodo, of whom Slava says: “Everyone says he’s kind, but he’s brave,” before Anya adds, “a little embodiment of the Ukrainian spirit.” Time and time again, documentary does this, planting a seed that might be perceptive, poignant, or just plain ingenious and then denying the viewer the opportunity to make a not-so-big leap.

Compared to other Sundance Award winners, Angela Patton and Natalie Ray girls, Porcelain War He suggests that having a co-director who is also a featured subject in your documentary may be good for intimacy, but is not always ideal for dramatic clarity. Expecting director Slava Leontiev to agree to the possibility of cutting 75 percent of the theme’s voiceover — utterly poetic and entirely repetitive — is a big ask.

I feel that in the absence of this voiceover, none of the themes of the documentary would be lost or diluted. It would be much easier to marvel at Stefanov’s photography, to be heartbroken by the editors’ tragic juxtapositions, to celebrate the animation that flows from Anya’s little panels, and to wait incessantly through a horrific sequence shot on a military body. -cam. Or just to immerse yourself in the music of the Ukrainian quartet Dakhabrakha while Frodo frolics carelessly on the brink of war.