The least I could do this week was to focus my attention on Ukrainian film as an homage to a country and culture that is in these days so viciously attacked by an aggressor. One thought I had is if I saturate my mind with images and stories of people and places from this part of the world, I will be able to feel greater kinship and respect for how people have tried to live their lives and build their future. That it would help me to draw nearer to their hearts and lives.

But it is not that simple to find films from Ukraine. It asks for some real effort and determination.  So, this is not in any way a complete selection, but these were for me the best of the ones that I was able to access.

Thinking of contemporary Ukrainian film my thoughts immediately go to Sergei Loznitsa, a Ukrainian director who started his career as a director of documentaries and moved into fiction film while continuing his documentary career. The first film from Loznitsa I saw was In the Fog from 2012. This week I revisited the film together with friends and it deeply engaged us again. This is not about the recent war, but the story is set in WW II in 1942 at the Western Front. It is about a man wrongly accused of collaboration, facing a lot of difficult moral decisions; about life in wartime and how everything seems to be in the fog!

Other films from Loznitsa which deserve to be mentioned are the 2017 film A Gentle Creature which I wrote about on Nexus in March 2019 and Donbass from 2018 which is about life in the Russian-occupied region of Donbass. It shows the propaganda, manipulation and ruthlessness that we now witness from Russia on a full scale.

Valentyn Vasyanovich´s film Reflection from 2021 was screened at the Gothenburg Film Festival. It tells the story of a surgeon in Kiev called Sergey. After having met a friend who just returned from the frontline, he feels a growing obligation to do his part and he volunteers for service at the front. Captured by military forces in the Russian zone, he experiences and witnesses the most horrifying scenes of humiliation, torture and violence. After his release he returns to Kiev and slowly has to learn how to be a human being again, how to receive and to give love. The film asks the question what happens with the soul of a man and of a nation in a time of war. These are the kinds of questions I ponder about these days.

The Danish documentary maker Simon Lering Wilmont has close ties with Eastern Ukraine. In 2017 he made The Distant Barking of Dogs, in which he follows Oleg, a 10-year old boy who lives with his grandmother very near the frontline of the war in the Donbass region. It is about a child who has nowhere else to go, growing up hearing the daily bombardments, learning to survive.

When Wilmont heard that the grandmother had fallen ill with heart problems, he worried about Oleg and what would happen with him if he could no longer live with her. That made him go back to Eastern Ukraine and research what happens with orphaned children. That led to his new documentary A House Made of Splinters (2022), which won an award at the Salt Lake City Sundance Film Festival. It gives us a look from the inside of an orphanage, how war and violence have caused misery within families and how children need much help to find future and hope.