Year: 2024

Runtime: 98 minutes

Directed by: Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev

By Sarah Manvel

Works of art like this one serve two purposes: they stand as a record of the makers in case they do not survive, and they remind us of the importance of the work that goes into art. The importance of art in the fight against fascism is the point of “Porcelain War,” a documentary in competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival about artists who have turned into soldiers in the Ukrainian war against Russia. In addition to its focus on art, it features battle footage shot from drones, and also over-the-shoulder footage from GoPros attached to soldiers’ shoulders or helmets. The war is in the first person. Seeing battlefield footage from the point of view of the soldier is a brand new experience, and for this reason alone “Porcelain War” is worth seeing. But to focus solely on the war footage would be to do “Porcelain War” a disservice, because it is above all about the power of art. 

Co-director Slava Leontyev shot most of the footage in 2022 and 2023 himself, with his wife Anya Stasenko and best friend Andrey Stefanov. They all met in art school and have been fairly inseparable since. Slava and Anya are ceramicists from Kharkiv; Slava casts and shapes figurines which Anya then paints. They both chose to work with ceramics because, as they say, ceramics are easily broken but hard to destroy. In two different sequences Anya’s paintings on the figurines are animated as in voiceover they explain certain aspects of life in wartime which are difficult to face directly. But there’s also a delightful sequence where the soldiers of Slava’s squadron play with a sculpture of a dragonlet which Anya has painted in camouflage colour. (One of the soldiers is a woman, who at one point laughingly tries to get out of an unpleasant physical job by reminding everyone she’s a woman, only to be sternly told, “In the army there is no gender, only warriors.”) Andrey is a landscape painter who fled with his wife and twin daughters to Kharkiv from the Crimea, though when a friend in Lithuania offered to take them in Andrey was not allowed to join them. Andrey misses them extremely but is glad they are missing the war, but is finding everything so difficult he is unable to paint. He is clearly the person who shot most of the sequences of Slava working as a weapons instructor (one young female student drew the Motörhead logo on the side of her rifle), and it’s also him who filmed Slava and Anya taking their beloved little dog, Frodo, on forest walks which turn into a hunt for landmines. 

This juxtaposition of the extreme horror of war amidst everyday life, where dishes have to be done and money still needs to be earned, well. People can get used to anything, but no one ever really gets used to this. All three of them discuss the sense they have that the time of the war is not really happening, that the things they are doing as part of the war are not their real lives, even as they acknowledge the disconnect between people in Ukraine experiencing the war and people elsewhere whose lives are less affected. There’s even some sympathy for the Russian soldiers, who are fighting for leaders who do not respect human life. But all the people who speak are unsurprisingly resigned to the need to make these personal sacrifices and steadfast in their resolve to fight to the last against the invasion. And for these modern-day civilian soldiers, art is a key weapon in that resistance. Making something from your own thoughts, whether it’s the logo of your favourite band on the side of your rifle, or painting a drone to look like a googly-eyed alien, is an assertion of the self which is not valued under fascism. Anya, who refused to leave Slava for a place of greater safety because it would have been like cutting off her own shadow, speaks the most thoughtfully about the value of art even in this time of crisis, and how essential it is that beauty is not lost in the middle of all this destruction.

It’s very deeply affecting, as is the horrifying point-of-view sequence of the female soldier named Katya running for the medical kit and then into a bombed building to help treat a wounded stranger. As she begins to run, she tells herself, “It’s OK, I’ll try my best.” It’s unbearable, and yet it must be borne, as all human things must be. And the enormous value of “Porcelain War” is how beautifully it explains its ideas for making bearing this a little easier.