This portmanteau film – produced by Warsaw Film School and released for the third anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine – is in the Come and See tradition: a near-phantasmagoric descent into the brutalising reality of the battlefield. Equally anti-war and anti-Russia, its interconnected stories kick off in the faintly theatrical and moralist mode sometimes seen in east European drama, before accelerating for the climax into a bravura cinematic sequence: a baby’s point of view on Russian pillaging and destruction.
The film is comprised of five threads: an unnamed Polish traveller (Cezary Pazura) arrives in Ukraine to meet his doctor lover (Oksana Cherkashyna), but is sidetracked into taking a group of orphans with visual impairments to the zoo. Tasked with escorting the kids back over the border, he stops in at her parents’ house – but the old war hero (Hryhorii Bokovenko) and his wife (Nina Naboka) refuse to abandon it. Tatiana Yurikova plays a blinged-up Russian mother who has paid her way to the frontline to look for her missing son; it turns out he is in a Ukrainian hospital bed and appalling the doctor we have already seen with his opinions on Russian superiority. And finally, the frame story, seen in bleary cot-cam: a huddle of Ukrainian women in a basement hidey-hole.
