Ukrainian society and culture have been portrayed many times in recent years through impressive productions by ambitious filmmakers exploring the human losses caused by Russia's military attacks.
Although the themes are distressing, their cinema offers a kaleidoscopic view of the lives and concerns of modern Ukrainians who have been facing difficulties since Russia's 2014 takeover of Crimea and the ongoing war in the Donbass region.
These are five films that give us an opportunity to understand the Russia-Ukraine conflict through the eyes of renowned Ukrainian artists.
Reflection - Valentin Vasjanovic (2021)
Valentin Vassjanovic's recent feature film «Reflection» was one of the most popular films screened at the Venice International Film Festival last year. Vasyanovich presents the sad story of a young cosmopolitan doctor who offers to help the wounded near the battlefield in the Donbass region of Ukraine. But he is almost immediately captured by Russian-speaking soldiers who pretend to be locals but are actually Russian mercenaries helping Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom - Evgeny Afinefsky (2015)
Evgeny Afinefsky's Oscar-nominated documentary (available on Netflix) features a montage of battlefield protests sparked by the Ukrainian government's 2014 decision to suspend the signing of a trade agreement with the European Union in favour of Vladimir Putin's close ties with Russia - a key chapter that led to Russia's invasion of Ukraine that began on Thursday.
Homeward - Nariman Aliyev (2019)
Ukrainian filmmaker Nariman Aliyev's Homeward premiered at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival when the first-time director was just 26 years old. The film opens with 50-year-old hot-tempered father Mustafa and his sullen 20-year-old son Alim visiting a morgue in Kiev to collect the body of Alim's older brother Nazim, who was killed in combat when he volunteered to fight on the border with Russia.
Mustafa has family roots in Crimea's highly oppressed Muslim ethnic Tatar minority and believes that he should carry Nazim's lifeless body across the country to bury him in his ancestral homeland. So thus begins a road trip across Ukraine that becomes more and more episodic as time goes on.
The Earth Is Blue as an Orange - Irina Chilik (2020)
Irina Chilik's documentary follows a Ukrainian single mother, Hanna, and her four children as they try to keep their home a safe haven full of life as bombs fall around them and chaos ensues. The family has a passion for film and Chilik documents each member as she films her own film inspired by true wartime events - turning trauma into art.
Atlantis - Valentin Vasiljanovic (2018)
Coincidentally, Valentin Vasyanovich's film «Atlantis» won the 2018 Best Film Award in the «Horizons» section of the Venice Film Festival, on the same day that imprisoned Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov was released by Russia in a prisoner swap.
But Vasilanovic's film is far from a happy finale. It is set in a fictional 2025 when the patriotic forces in Eastern Ukraine have ended their long war with Russia. But all is not well in this agonizing story told by a soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) who has lost his family, home and the meaning of life to war. It is a dark, but at times «light» and human.
