More than 18 months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, several documentarians presented works about the conflict at the Toronto film festival, saying it is more important than ever to continue talking about it.
Oscar-nominated Egyptian director Karim Amer presented his film Defiant, which chronicles the first year of the war as seen by Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and other senior Ukrainian officials. Polish filmmaker Maciek Hamela took a different approach with Pierre Feuille Pistolet, filming his own journeys to help Ukrainian civilians flee the country during the first months of the conflict in 2022. From the United Nations to the White House, Amer follows Minister Kuleba, who urges the West to support Kiev to the fullest extent possible in the face of Russian firepower. The film also focuses on Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, whose initial mission to bring all public services online turned into a full-blown cyber war supported by a massive “cyber army” of volunteer hackers.
Also read: Lil Nas X rocks the Toronto International Film Festival with his new documentary
“We didn’t know exactly what the story would be, but we knew we wanted it to be character-driven, about the things the government was doing to communicate with the world,” Mr. Amer told AFP , 39 years old, before the premiere. Mr. Amer, who produced The Square, nominated for an Oscar and about the events in Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2011, insisted on showing a film “about war and its relationship with the world”, without showing images of battles or civil suffering. “There are other front lines that seem just as important to us in a war, and these are often invisible,” he said. “The people we followed have, in many ways, inadvertently invented a new rule of the game in real time.”
At the beginning of the film, Dmytro Kuleba meets with US President Joe Biden, who he said seemed to be “bidding farewell to the entire Ukrainian nation.” A year later, Joe Biden now believes Ukraine can defeat Russia, a change Minister Kuleba attributes in part to his diplomatic efforts around the world. The film’s producer, Odessa Rae, who won an Oscar last year for her documentary Navalny about imprisoned Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, said Moscow had been offered the chance to participate in the project, but those requests were remained unanswered. For Karim Amer, “this is the most extraordinary political event since the Second World War. What is happening in Ukraine affects everyone on this planet, even if we don’t talk about it that way. As Mr Kuleba says on camera: no one will be able to stay away from this crisis.
With Pierre Feuille Pistolet, presented at several festivals including Cannes since May, but which made its North American debut on Tuesday in Toronto, director Maciek Hamela takes an intimate look at the suffering of ordinary people who get into his van, rolling towards an uncertain future. “I’m a filmmaker, but I stopped making films and doing any other work to drive. And I just focused on driving,” the forty-year-old told AFP in an interview. “People knew I was doing it, so they were calling me, you know, asking me to take their friends’ families, or friends of friends,” he added, estimating he had done about 100 trips over a six-month period, with a few breaks.
Once he decided to turn his camera on his passengers, the horrors of war played out in confessional-style interviews in his rearview mirror: rape, torture, displacement, death, loss, all against the backdrop of bridges and houses destroyed by bombing. “The first interview was difficult. After that, you get used to it,” said a male passenger. Another woman described living for a month in a cave in Mariupol, the port city captured by Russia after a long and brutal siege in 2022. Maciek Hamela said he hoped his film would remind “above all of world that this war is still ongoing”, but would “also show a much more intimate side of the war, which could help viewers put themselves in the shoes of ordinary Ukrainians”. “It is important to make documentaries about all conflicts that raise awareness of the current state of the world we live in,” he said, citing the situations in Afghanistan, Sudan, Syria and Yemen as fueling a global refugee crisis.