A lot has happened since a Malaysian passenger jet disappeared over the skies in Ukraine in July 2014 – over the lands of Luhansk and Donetsk that Russia had recently occupied, to be precise – and Roman Liubyi’s fraught but sensitive doc, Iron Butterflies, draws a straight line from that terrible event to the all-out warfare of the present-day invasion. While largely sidestepping the morbid fascination of plane crashes (this one killed all 298 people on board), the filmmaker doggedly circles around the tragedy’s political and military implications and its aftermath, dominated by a Russian disinformation campaign designed to cast blame elsewhere.
The film recreates the drama from multiple viewpoints, including clips of the Russian special forces who were ultimately shown to have shot down the plane after mistaking it for a Ukrainian military transport. This shocking error leads straight into a Russian cover-up accompanied by blaming the Ukrainians for the disaster via a concerted media effort packed with every form of fake news, a familiar scenario in the ongoing Ukraine-Russian war.
It’s a timely topic for another reason as well, because just last November investigators at the District Court of The Hague returned their verdict that in all probability the plane was deliberately shot down by a Russian-made surface-to-air missile called a BUK. Iron Butterflies is at its most intriguing, and infuriating, when it supplies corroborating evidence: an intercepted exchange of terse comments by Russian military intelligence; Russian soldiers gleefully taking selfies beside the wreckage of the plane while local residents rejoice at the downing of an “enemy aircraft” (this was immediately after the missile hit, before the dead passengers began to be identified as foreign civilians.)
A written preface gives the viewer some necessary background: in early 2014, following mass shootings of protesters, Ukrainian president Yanukovych fled to Russia. Russian special forces then invaded Crimea and annexed it, while fighting spread to Donetsk and Luhansk. The Russians imported their anti-aircraft system BUK, featuring quartets of huge missiles that were to play a lethal role in downing flight MH17.
Liubyi is imaginative in adopting a bevy of media formats to get his points across, from archive footage and historic propaganda films to time lapse photography, TV news shows and excerpts from social media. Not all of it is equally successful; for example, a theatrical performance in which silent actors go left and right getting in each other’s way is simply distracting and puzzling. Its connection to people’s emotional state as they await news of their loved ones on the plane is tenuous at best. But other scenes have a wrenching poetry that captures something of the unbearable waste of life, and Liubyi’s cinematography of eastern Ukraine’s fields of withered sunflowers and storms of birds flying over coal mines is vividly evocative. The whole film is uplifted by an exceptional soundtrack by Anton Baibakov and Oleksandra Morozova, whose subtle modern music is entirely appropriate.
As far as justice goes, the brief scenes at The Hague referencing the trial and conviction of three Russians, who were sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia, can be read either as a glass half-full (offering some kind of closure and satisfaction for the passengers’ relatives) or half-empty (the convicted men are not expected to be extradited and are unlikely to ever serve prison time).
Director, cinematography: Roman Liubyi
Screenplay, editing: Roman Liubyi, Mila Zhluktenko
Producers: Andrii Kotliar, Volodymyr Tykhyy, David Armati Lechner, Isabelle Bertolone, Trini Götze
Executive producer: Anna Zobnina
Production design: Volodymyr Liubyi
Costume design: Tetyana Lavrinenko, Lisa Yarinovskaya
Music: Anton Baibakov, Oleksandra Morozova
Sound: Andreas Goldbrunner, Andrii Rogachov
Production companies: Babylon’13
World sales:
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Panorama Dokumente)
In Ukrainian, Russian, English
84 minutes
