Ukraine Cinema: Films That Explore the Human Toll of Russia’s Aggression
Some of Ukraine’s filmmakers have been exploring the trauma that followed Russia’s invasions of Crimea and the Donbas region.
Ambitious Ukrainian filmmakers have made various features exploring the human toll of Russia’s military aggression.
Such cinema offers a kaleidoscopic view into the lives and concerns of contemporary Ukrainians coping with the deadly hardships of Russia’s 2014 takeover of Crimea and warfare in the Donbas region.
The films offer an opportunity for greater empathy and understanding of the conflict, seen through the vision of Ukrainian artists.
Atlantis (2018) Valentyn Vasyanovych
Director Valentyn Vasyanovych’s Atlantis won best film at the 2018 Venice Film Festival in the horizons section on the same day that imprisoned Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov was released by Russia in a prisoner exchange.
The film is set in an imagined 2025 after patriotic forces in the Eastern Ukraine have finally brought the long war with Russia to a successful end. But not all is well in this anguished time-shifting story, told through the eyes of a soldier suffering from PTSD who has lost his family, home and the very meaning of life in the war.
Involving suicide, the processing of mass graves and ecological devastation, the film is a potent meditation on the enduring trauma of war even in imagined victory.
Extra Viewing: ‘Servants of the People’ (2015-2019), starring Volodymyr Zelenskyy
The United States isn’t the only nation to vote a colorful TV star into its highest office. Ukraine’s current president Volodymyr Zelenskyy famously rose to public prominence in the country thanks to the wildly popular political comedy Servant of the People, a TV series he created, starred in and produced via his production company Kvartal 95. The trajectory is particularly surreal given Zelenskyy’s role on the show: He played an everyman who is catapulted into the presidency after becoming a viral sensation by speaking out against government corruption. While Servant of the People‘s third and final season was in production in 2018, employees at Kvartal 95 created a political party bearing the same name as the TV show. Zelenskyy then announced his candidacy for the 2019 Ukrainian presidential election, leveraging his popular outsider persona and speaking out against corruption — ultimately winning the race in a landslide with 73.2 percent of the vote.
