Porcelain is fragile, but can withstand extreme heat and be restored after thousands of years of burial. This artistic material serves as a symbol of gentleness, creativity and resilience in Porcelain War, which screened in the Horizons section at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and won the Documentary Grand Jury prize at Sundance.
Reinforcing hope in humanity while not underplaying the hellish nature of genocidal warfare is hardly an easy task for cinema. But co-directors Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev manage to beautifully strike a balance in their moving and sensitive portrait of an artist couple (Slava, and his partner Anya Stasenko) who maintain their practice of sculpting, firing, and painting figurines in Kharkiv, 25 miles from the Russian border, while Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine rages. Slava also turns his attention, through reluctant necessity, to uglier tools, training civilians who have never picked up a gun before to be defenders against the oncoming professional army. Slava films their experiences in collaboration with his best friend and fellow artist, Andrey Stefanov. Porcelain War is made up of their footage, as well as exquisite sequences in which the paintings on porcelain creations are animated. Both their art and this documentary have been made as acts of resistance, with the trio all too aware that the destruction of culture and its makers, and the silencing of people’s histories, is an imperialist strategy harnessed by the Russian regime for Ukraine’s erasure. Ukrainian folk music quartet DakhaBraka provide the soundtrack, their exquisite and haunting harmonies infused with fierce emotion and the flair to reinvent.
It is easy to scare people, but hard to forbid them to live. That’s one of numerous wise aphorisms voiced in a documentary that ponders the paradoxes of the current fraught situation under invasion. The sunny, bucolic world of nature is contrasted with drone footage of charred Ukrainian cities subjected to apocalyptic decimation, as war echoes through nature in explosive objects and craters, and air alarms scream disturb the air. Slava and Anya still go to the woods to collect mushrooms, a favourite Ukrainian pastime, despite the fact they are now just as likely to uncover landmines under moss as they are edible fungus. They knock “danger” signs into the ground where mines are found, and continue on their way; they would risk more, as far as they see it, by not going at all and trying to exist locked in their basements. Even so, the decision of whether to stay and defend their home city or flee is excruciatingly difficult, and family separation is an inevitable source of anxiety and pain. The couple’s two daughters are living in exile, and stay in touch through the flat screens of technology; a panicked, perilous thousand-kilometre journey over a snowy mountain pass with no brakes to the border to take them to safety is recounted with nerve-shredding immediacy.
Porcelain War runs the gamut of emotion. A warm and steady optimism flows from discussions around the reflections of the artists and defenders on their creativity and resilience, interspersed with alarming, high-adrenaline footage from the frontline of Bakhmut, where “hell is happening” and death hangs close. This is not simply a triumphal celebration of patriotism, which is also explored as a paradox, in all of its virtues and flaws, as the battle for freedom necessitates sacrificing one’s personal life and safety. In its tribute to the inspiring, endlessly inventive aspects of human behaviour that extreme situations of pressure can reveal, Porcelain War stands out as one of the stronger recent documentaries to emerge on the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, which currently has no end in sight, and on human resistance and psychological adaptation in times of war generally.
Directors: Brendan Bellomo, Slava Leontyev
Screenwriters: Aniela Sidorska, Brendan Bellomo, Paula DuPre Pesmen
Producers: Aniela Sidorska, Paula DuPre Pesmen, Camilla Mazzaferro, Olivia Ahnemann
Cinematographer: Andrey Stefanov
Editing: Brendan Bellomo, Aniela Sidorska, Kelly Cameron
Music: DakhaBrakha
Sound: Sam Hayward
Production companies: Finch No Worries (Australia), Imaginary Lane (USA)
Sales: Submarine Entertainment
Venue: Karlovy Vary (Horizons)
In Ukrainian, Russian, English
87 minutes
