More than two years into Russia’s invasion, Ukraine’s strong presence at the Cannes Film Festival bears witness to its stubborn defence and the resilience of its film industry. The war’s pervasive impact on civilian life is the subject of “The Invasion”, whose director Sergei Loznitsa spoke to FRANCE 24 in Cannes.
For the third year running, the world’s leading film festival is unfolding in the shadow of a devastating war raging in eastern Europe – a conflict that is still on the minds of many here in Cannes.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky famously opened the festival two years ago with a video-link address urging filmmakers to challenge Russia like the way Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” took on Adolf Hitler. Films by and about Ukrainians featured prominently that year, including “Mariupolis 2” by Lithuania’s Mantas Kvedaravicius, who paid with his own life for his efforts to document the city’s destruction at the hands of Russian forces.
The war made a stark reappearance last year when a woman dressed in the blue and yellow colours of the Ukraine flag covered herself in fake blood on the red carpet ahead of a gala premiere. Maciek Hamela’s documentary “In the Rearview”, about the evacuation of Ukrainian refugees, ensured the country’s plight was represented on the big screen too.
Against all odds, Ukraine’s film industry is still producing movies, some made by filmmakers who are now also soldiers. Their work is showcased at the Ukrainian pavilion in Cannes, part of to the world’s largest film market.
“We lost a lot of colleagues to the war but we have many talented filmmakers who are keeping up the work,” said producer Kateryna Tetriakova. “And we’re getting great support here at the market.”
Ukrainian films presented this year include “Real”, a war documentary shot on the frontline by Oleg Sentsov, the soldier-director who spent more than five years in prison in Russia for opposing its annexation of his native Crimea in 2014.
But not all the works are documentaries.
Film.UA, Ukraine’s largest production company, is marketing several genre features including “The Witch. Revenge”, a supernatural horror about a witch exacting revenge on Russian invaders. Evgeniy Drachov, the company’s head of sales, spoke of “an appetite among buyers for more than just documentaries about war”.
Tetriakova said it was important for both filmmakers and their audience to be able to approach other subjects as well, including comedies.
“There are about 500 cinemas in Ukraine that are still functioning,” she said. “We cannot give up our lives because of the war.”
Ukrainians’ dogged resilience in the face of war is the subject of Sergei Loznitsa’s documentary “The Invasion”, part of Cannes’ Special Screenings segment.
A companion piece to the director’s seminal 2014 documentary “Maidan”, it marks Loznitsa’s return to the festival two years after he premiered “The Natural History of Destruction”, an archive documentary about the devastation wrought by aerial bombing in World War II.
‘Total destruction’
Towards the end of Loznitsa’s film, a woman is seen piling up bricks left scattered on the ground by a Russian bombardment, as though she were single-handedly rebuilding the walls of her gutted home. The camera takes its time, patiently observing her as she toils away in silence, capturing the resilience of a people whose life has been upended by war.
Loznitsa said his initial idea was to make a series of short films about the war, described as “urgent dispatches” that would be broadcast “almost real-time”. Those dispatches provided much of the material for “The Invasion”, built as a series of snapshots of daily life under Russian attack, without ever showing the enemy and the actual fighting.
“My primary interest was the people, how they live in these conditions, how war impacts them,” the filmmaker explained. “What is so interesting about battle scenes, shots being fired and burned out tanks?”
“The Invasion” pictures civilians as they line up at water fountains and soup kitchens, give class in school basements turned into bomb shelters, or take ice baths in freezing lakes, seemingly unfazed by the air-raid sirens wailing.
We see fully furnished kitchens sliced open by bombardments, amputees learning to walk with prosthetic limbs, and a soldier dressed as Father Christmas trying to put a smile on children’s faces. Funerals of young men killed in combat, and a wedding in army uniform, underscore how society’s defining rituals are shaped by the ever-present war.
“It is very difficult to actually convey the experience of living under an invasion,” Loznitsa said. “It was necessary to use powerful images and the most impactful moments in life.”
In one scene, bundles of Russian books are hurled into the back of a truck and carried to a junkyard. We see works by the likes of Alexander Pushkin and Fyodor Dostoevsky rolling past on a conveyor belt towards a shredder, part of what Loznitsa described as the “total destruction” wrought by war.
“It's not only people’s lives that are being destroyed. It’s not only that they lose their limbs or their loved ones,” he said. “They also lose a part of their psyche.”
Loznitsa was kicked out of the Ukrainian Film Academy in 2022 after he criticised its boycott of all Russian films in response to the invasion, a position he still defends.
“This is what war does to us,” said the filmmaker, whose past works have documented the social upheaval caused by armed conflicts. He added: “To change our attitude towards Dostoyevsky and Russian culture, that’s terrible.”
Read moreEvacuation of Kyiv icons takes fight for Ukraine’s heritage to Louvre in Paris
The filmmaker voiced alarm at the situation on the frontline, where the Russian army’s superior resources and firepower are tipping the scale in Moscow’s favour. More than two years into the war, he said Europe was yet to grasp the full scale of the catastrophe unfolding on its doorstep.
“It is terrible that Europeans do not understand that this war directly affects them,” he said. “The Russian war machine is not going to stop fighting. They even openly talk about where this machine is heading. Poland is being mentioned, so are the Baltic states. Unless the Russians are stopped, it will continue.”
He suggested his next project, which he described as a fiction on the “mechanisms of terror” set in Stalin’s era, was of relevance to the West.
“It’s not just about Russia,” he said. “It’s about saving democracy, too, because we are going backwards in our development.”
