For the time being, they are still filming the Ukrainian filmmaker Valentyn Vasyanovych (50) and his producer Vladimir Yatsenko (43). At the front, among the Ukrainian soldiers. But also just the lives of their friends, at home in Kyiv, the city barricaded by the Russian troops. ‘It is purely documenting, capturing this time, this war. There’s no storyline in it.’
Fragments of it are immediately released: spread it among the broadcasters. ‘Now we choose the camera. But when it comes down to it, we too will have to take up arms. We have no other choice. We are grateful that our wives and children had a place to flee to, but we cannot. For us, this is an existential war. We remain, and will fight to the death. That’s not pathetic, just the reality.’
Vasyanovych and Yatsenko, who make video calls from Kyiv, fall silent for a moment. The director in particular looks jaded: deep bags under the eyes. “Isn’t it unbelievable that you have to have these kinds of conversations, in the 21st century?”
Both men are prominent figures within the Ukrainian film community. Their prophetic film Atlantis, awarded in Venice in 2019, is set in the disrupted Ukraine of 2025, a year after the war with Russia. ‘Ukraine wins in that film. I have always believed that we will win. And I thought: but what comes after the war? All those people with post-traumatic stress, the destroyed cities…’
In their new drama Reflection An imprisoned Ukrainian army doctor witnesses torture by Russian paramilitaries in occupied eastern Ukraine. Also in this film, which was included in the main competition of the Venice Film Festival in September 2021, the main character struggles with post-traumatic stress after his release. At the world premiere of Reflection – which was shown in various Dutch cinemas this week, with the proceeds going entirely to the Ukrainian filmmakers, as a benefit – the Russian threat to Ukraine was no longer so high on the news agenda. Some visitors to the film festival were amazed at the horrific scenes of violence in the long-held tableaus Reflection† yet very gruesome and dull.
Anyone who sees the two films now, in the context of the current horrors of war, sees with different eyes. ‘We have been living with this war for eight years,’ says director Vasyanovych. ‘Of course not on the current, enormous scale, but that war was there all along. But until recently we also did not believe that it would really become a major war. And at the same time I had a premonition, it hung in the air. That’s also why I made these films.’
Reflection is based in part on testimonies of Ukrainians detained in the Izolyatsia prison near Donetsk. ‘It was once a factory, later a center for modern art, and then the cruellest prison in the occupied region. I was shocked when I first heard about it: the torture, the horrors that people are capable of,” says Vasyanovych.
Producer Jatsenko: ‘The same thing is happening again. The Russian troops kill people for nothing, they don’t care if they are civilians. Or children. We’ve seen it with our own eyes, in Bucha and Irpin: families trying to flee in cars with white stripes on them, which were fired upon. And this does not stop, if Ukraine falls. Then the Baltic states follow. All of Europe is faced with this great evil.’