Compared with the award-winning The Earth Is As Blue As an Orange from 2020, which charted a Ukrainian family’s attempt to make a film during the Russian incursion into the Donbas, this equally art-minded dispatch inches closer to the frontline. Following, and largely shot by, Kharkiv civilian soldiers Slava Leontyev and Andrey Stefanov, a ceramicist and a painter respectively, this glowingly photographed chronicle is another staunch defence of creativity in the face of aggression. But it throws up a few uncomfortable caveats.
As well as being an elite marksman, Slava likes kiln-firing Pokémon-esque porcelain critters such as snails and dragons. Decorated by his wife Anya with intricate faerie-scapes reminiscent of Stanley Spencer (charmingly animated for the film), they are intended to keep beauty alive amid devastation. And the material itself, porcelain, symbolises Ukrainian resistance: easy to damage, hard to destroy. Meanwhile, Andrey – forced to send his wife and two daughters to Lithuania – has stopped painting. Still happy to get behind a camera, though, he too recognises that Ukrainian culture is precisely what Putin aims to stamp out.
