Short films from the Culture vs War project, initiated by the Watch Ukrainian! Association and supported by the European Commission, tell the stories of those who left their peaceful lives behind when the full-scale invasion began and joined the Ukrainian army. These are documentary stories of the struggle of well-known Ukrainian artists, famous not only in Ukraine but also beyond its borders.
In order to convey the truth about Russia’s war against Ukraine to the world and to reach the widest possible audience, the creators of the project, with the support of the International Renaissance Foundation and the assistance of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, have dubbed six films into the most widely spoken languages in the world: English, Spanish and Arabic. Currently, 464 project events have already covered 189 cities in 48 countries around the world.
The films are distributed on multimedia, streaming and YouTube platforms, as well as on TV channels in the Middle East (the UAE and Qatar), Africa (South Africa), Latin America (Mexico) and Asia (India). Each film is an important step towards a just peace.
Vladimir Voitenko, editor-in-chief of Kino-Kolo magazine, wrote reviews of three of the six films in the project.
Culture Against War
Antytila is a Ukrainian musical punk band founded in 2007. In the film Culture vs War. Antytila, the band’s frontman Taras Topolia says that for musicians, the war began in 2014. They have lived through this time in war.
And I live through this time with several memories.
In 2014, many people not only remained in the temporarily occupied territories, but also travelled around Ukraine. Each of us knows how good it is at home, no matter how warmly you are welcomed as a guest. So, after several years of wandering around Ukraine, a teenage girl returned to her native small town on the border with the so-called DPR. She says: “On my first day back, I was walking down the street when I heard an explosion, and then another. I fell to the ground to protect myself and said to myself, ‘Thank God, I’m finally home. Well, fate is protecting me, but, as experience shows, people get used to prison. And I already understand, without going down to the bomb shelter during the night shelling in Kyiv, that I have gotten used to it and, like that girl, thank God, I am at home.
In the summer of 2022, I spoke with the widow of my third cousin Victor. We sat on a wooden bench in the village on Zarechnaya Street, formerly Panskaya Street, fifty metres below the Gluhivka River, which flowed like a pond, with nettles and other weeds growing under our feet. Galya, in despair, asks me, as if I were from Kyiv, couldn’t Poroshenko have agreed on everything with Putin? Excuse me for thinking, I shake my head: don’t you know how long this has been going on? ‘How long?’ ‘Galya, several centuries, if not half a millennium.’ ‘Really?!’ ‘Don’t you remember Ukrainian history from school?’ My dear Galya replies, ‘But that was so long ago…’
Good people, I can’t even remember what the subject and textbook were called. Probably ‘History of the Ukrainian SSR.’ I remember it was thin. But a peculiar interpretation of Ukrainian historical events was cleverly woven into more general historical subjects. Of course, everywhere they talked about the Pereyaslav Council and the ‘reunification’ of Ukraine with Russia thanks to Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Now the city of Pereyaslav is no longer Khmelnytskyi, and the Russian-Ukrainian war continues. In the West, they call it more simply — the Ukrainian War.
These paintings are based on reflections on transformation, rethinking values, creativity and war
The war in which we have been living for centuries, since the days of our great-grandfathers, is in fact a war of cultures, and therefore of worldviews.
The documentary film series ‘Culture vs. War’ about this war and the artists involved in it has been produced by the ‘Watch Ukrainian!’ Association since April 2022.
The films are dedicated to Ukrainian filmmakers and well-known artists who defend Ukraine in the ranks of the Armed Forces. These films are short. They are based on reflections on transformation during combat operations, on rethinking values, on creativity and war.
The heroes of three of the six films are: one of the world’s best cinematographers, Serhiy Mikhalchuk; the piercing actor and director Akhtem Seitablaiev; and the band Antytila.
Serhiy has won the Silver Bear at the Berlinale and shoots most of his films with his childhood friend Oles Sanin. Their latest feature film, Dovbush, is about the leader of the Ukrainian rebels who fought against the Polish nobility in the 18th century.
Akhtem is the author of the films Haytarma and Cyborgs. His character in the film Home takes his son, who died on the eastern front, to be buried in occupied Crimea. For Seitablaiev, a Crimean Tatar, this war began, as he attests in the film, on 22 February 2014 in Simferopol, when the annexation of the peninsula effectively began. Ukrainian cinemas screened his directorial debut, Mirny-21, about the resistance of Luhansk border guards to the Russian invaders in 2014. One of the leading roles in Mirny-21 was played by Pavlo Li. The same man who joined the territorial defence forces in February 2022 and died on 6 March during the Russian bombing of Irpin.
The film about Seytablaev is called ‘Akhtem Seytablaev.’ The film about Mikhalchuk is also called ‘Serhiy Mikhalchuk.’ And that’s all that’s needed. They embody a culture that is against war. On screen, we see Sergey and Akhtem speaking directly, sharing their candid worldviews and showing relevant footage of military life. Just like in Antytila, we see the painful candour of Taras Topolya and his fellow musicians.
What is the value of the confrontation between culture and war?
On the one hand, it is a fixation on an eternal duel, because human societies – due to their weakness – have been unwilling to renounce war throughout their several thousand years of history. Culture is an extremely sophisticated and complex matter, involving millions of rhymes and rhythms, multi-level dialogue, and the grandeur and despair of monologues. War, on the other hand, ostensibly promises a quick, forceful solution to what cannot be resolved through culture.
On the other hand, it is poetry, rhyme and rhythm that force culture to reflect on war, and, forgive me, to make war cultural. This does not mean that artists who took up firearms are dying on the front lines — it is not difficult to remember the actor Pavlo Li or the poet Illia Chernilevsky, but it is difficult to comprehend their absence from the Ukrainian cultural world.
The author and director of the films is Kadim Tarasov. He comes from Sloviansk in Donetsk Oblast, where fighting has been ongoing since 2014. He is a musician in the rock band Armada, which was the headliner of Chervona Ruta, and the author of dozens of music videos for the most interesting singers and bands. In cinema, he works as a director, composer, editor, and artist. And I am not surprised that Tarasov is making films in the series ‘Culture vs War’ in the Hollywood spirit, so to speak. There is a lot here. Sometimes it seems like too much. But these film novellas are not just about the military, but about creative people whose civic duty forced them to take up arms. Their artistic nature, their films and songs have not gone anywhere — here they are, watch and listen, you can also see the artistic character and style of unusual characters.
American cinema has conquered most of the world with its uncompromising pursuit of freedom and liberty
American cinema has conquered most of the world not only with its cult heroes and their uncompromising pursuit of freedom and liberty. Of course, it is extremely diverse in style, but its technical perfection, accomplished aesthetics of the frame and exquisite sound palette correspond to the highest artistic virtues. Undoubtedly, this is also because cinema is the most technological of the arts. Kadim Tarasov and his colleagues know this, feel it and do it. Let’s not forget that Ukrainian Anatoliy Kokush’s company Filmotechnic has two Oscars for technological cinema inventions. Without them, Titanic, War of the Worlds, Batman and Harry Potter would have been lame on the world’s screens.
The author and director of the films is Kadim Tarasov. He comes from Sloviansk in Donetsk Oblast, where fighting has been ongoing since 2014. He is a musician in the rock band Armada, which was the headliner of Chervona Ruta, and the author of dozens of music videos for the most interesting singers and bands. In cinema, he works as a director, composer, editor, and artist. And I am not surprised that Tarasov is making films in the series ‘Culture vs War’ in the Hollywood spirit, so to speak. There is a lot here. Sometimes it seems like too much. But these film novellas are not just about the military, but about creative people whose civic duty forced them to take up arms. Their artistic nature, their films and songs have not gone anywhere — here they are, watch and listen, you can also see the artistic character and style of unusual characters.
My late father, Mykola, spent a year and a half of his life on the front lines of World War II and was wounded four times. The best form of communication with his Ukrainian relatives was funeral triangles — letters. Now the bloodiest wars are different. The current Russian-Ukrainian war has become perhaps the most media-covered.
Ukrainian European culture is fighting against the Russian army
Antytila, a 40-minute film about them, find a way to fight with notes and words in addition to performing their military medical duties. Taras Topolia: ‘Our music has the energy of love. When we play music during this war, it helps, it heals.’ Antytila is on the front lines today, tomorrow they will sing with Irish rock band U2 vocalist Bono at Maidan Nezalezhnosti in the Kyiv metro, and the day after tomorrow at the Warsaw stadium with Englishman Ed Sheeran, actor in Star Wars and Game of Thrones. Topolia is fluent in English. Because of this, Antytila is actively engaged in cultural and military diplomacy. After all, it is extremely important for the world to realise that Ukrainian European culture is fighting against the Russian army.
Akhtem Seitablaiev gives us his undivided attention for half an hour, while Serhiy Mikhalchuk is much more concise, as a natural cinematographer should be — in 10 minutes, he manages to share the most important things, explain the tasks and philosophy of an artist with a weapon in his hands. Among other things, Mikhalchuk was awarded the Golden Dziga for Wild Field, based on Serhiy Zhadan’s novel about the initial accumulation of capital in Donbas in the 1990s.
Here, Serhiy soberly reflects: ‘In addition to the weapons we are given, the information front is very important… We also have a camera, and we can show what a soldier is not willing to show with his mobile phone. And we can make sure that this story and this war will be remembered.’
Mykhalchuk takes a lot of photographs. He passionately documents the Moscow-Ukrainian war, its participants, its nerves, its landscapes and weather. This is evident in the film. Sergei’s photos also appear from time to time on his Facebook page. It breathes the bloody front that has stretched over several centuries: “War works as a unifying ideology. The main thing is that we do not lose this in peacetime. And that after the war, we find the strength and courage to go through fire, water and copper pipes. So that we can rebuild, remain one nation, and everything will be for the best.”
We can make sure that this history and this war are remembered
We Ukrainians, as long as we are not physically wounded or killed, as bitter as it may be, get used to war and at the same time fear that the world will tire of it. And how did we ourselves experience these recent troubles in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria? Not so well. Perhaps that grief did not affect us as much. The Ukrainian war, let’s open our eyes, is a war between two worlds, two visions of the present and the future. To understand this, let’s look at Russia’s satellites. I won’t list them all, but essentially, it is a war between democracy and totalitarianism in its various manifestations.
The films in question convince us of this in different ways. Akhtem Seitablaiev philosophically elevates Crimean Tatar pain, Volyn native Serhiy Mykhalchuk almost mathematically analyses the Ukrainian community, and Kyiv native Taras Topolia sings and says in Ukrainian and English: ‘What Ukraine has not done in 30 years of restored statehood, my generation will cough up!’
Ukrainians and the whole world look up to the most prominent, the best, the most talented. And from these films, you can learn about them, about Ukraine’s painful history and European soul. These creative people worry about their families. They look at us and each speak their mind, but uncompromisingly…
Antytila: “The fact that we left our instruments and went to war is a logical decision. Because when a robber comes who wants to rape your family, kill you and take everything you hold dear — your life, your children — you simply have to rip out his throat, gouge out his eyes and eat them for even thinking about it.” And more about the European world: ‘We come from the same source, from the same cradle. We are fighting for you too…’
In the film, where Mikhalchuk is the hero, there is a fragment from Dovbush, when he says: ‘These are my mountains. I am the master here. And whoever comes into my house and tells me how to live will cough up his liver, I swear to God.’
Akhtem Seitablaiev dreams of the first day of Ukraine’s victory in the war with Muscovy as follows: “It’s probably corny. It’s the Crimean coast… My children and those I love are nearby. Some are swimming, some are laying out brynza cheese and tomatoes on a tablecloth, my father is pouring wine he made himself. Above us is a peaceful sky. And I just sit and watch. And breathe. That’s all.”
Source: KINO-KOLO
