A Film a Week - The Mousetrap

 previously published on Cineuropa

Shots are fired, loud, tense music plays, and shouts are heard during the pitch-black opening credits of Serhii Kastornykh’s feature-length fiction debut, The Mousetrap. Before that, we only get to see the dedicatory note to the defenders of Ukraine, which should not come as a surprise, bearing in mind the filmmaker’s two previous directorial efforts were documentaries about the forging of the new Ukrainian army and the troubles that war veterans face after demobilisation. The film has premiered in the official competition of the Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn.

The aftermath of the shoot-out leaves our hero, Anton (Yuri Kulinich, glimpsed in Natalya Vorozhbit’s Bad Roads and Oleh Sentsov’s Rhino), as the sole survivor. His leg is wounded and his arm is broken, but he is able to do a quick fix on it with some meds, a block of wood and some duct tape. However, there is a far greater danger for him: the fact that he is trapped in a small “room” in a dug-out trench that’s collapsed. All of his communication devices prove to be useless, while goods such as food, water and batteries are limited. He tries to dig himself out, but his knife cannot cut through the thick roots of the tree above him. His only company turns out to be a black mouse that he befriends and starts talking to. He might be losing his mind, but he still holds onto the hope that he could be saved…

In this regard, The Mousetrap reminds us of the myriad films in which the sole protagonist is in grave peril: stranded up in the mountains, lost at sea, buried in a coffin or locked in somewhere. We have seen many movies of this type, and they are rarely good. On the other hand, the few decent ones cannot be easily copied, since their gimmick usually works one time, and one time only. Bearing that in mind, Kastornykh is playing a game that he cannot possibly win.

On the other hand, he tries, like a brave and resourceful soldier, to make it work somehow, and for a period of time, it does. The camerawork in hand-held mode by Yura Kokol gives us a sense of the place and the only human character in it, Yuri Kulinich does his best to keep us interested in the destiny of Anton, while Kastornykh, serving as his own editor, opts for longer and more dynamic takes so the chaos of the situation feels realistic, rather than artificial. However, Hossein Mirzagholi’s musical score is a tad on the nose in an attempt to dictate how viewers should feel, and the inclusion of three additional songs in genres varying from power pop to heavy metal seems a bit over the top.

The crucial problem is the mise-en-scène rooted in genre presets. Should the filmmaker embrace the clichés and tropes of “survival cinema”, or should he be trying to subvert them, and if so, how? Ending the film satisfactorily, without stooping to “deus ex machina” devices, can also seem overly challenging. In the end, Kastornykh ticks all of the boxes of the trained viewer’s expectations and also employs a bag of well-worn tricks to stretch the material, better suited to a short movie, into a feature. All of this means that, noble intention to make an ode to Ukrainian war heroes aside, The Mousetrap does not offer much beyond what we have seen in similarly set B-movies.

A Film a Week - Flowers of Ukraine / Kwiaty Ukrainy

 previously published on Cineuropa

Major historical events can also change the lives of marginalised people. One such person is the protagonist of Adelina Borets’ debut feature-length documentary Flowers of Ukraine: an elderly lady called Natalia who has probably spent all of her life on the fringes of society. The event in question is the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which makes the premiere of Borets’ film, the opening movie in DOK Leipzig’s International Documentary Competition, a very timely one.

Borets opens her film with a series of shots of high-rises taken from ground level in a Kiev neighbourhood, followed by a reverse angle shot revealing the main seat of the action: a cluster of humble little houses which are basically shacks on a plot of land. One of these is occupied by Natalia, an elderly lady who’s full of life and who spends most of her time in her yard full of flowers, fruit and vegetables, where goats roam freely and chickens lay eggs. The atmosphere here is joyful and sees her living with a man of Russian origin nicknamed Kitty and often visited by her family members, including her teenage granddaughter Eva and her neighbours. The year is 2021, and the commune’s primary concern is a property development company’s attempts to drive them out in order to build a private kindergarten on their plot. Natalia sees her legal battle to keep her land as equal to the Ukrainian struggle to keep their language and faith during Soviet times.

Then, full-scale war breaks out and everything changes. Kitty tries to run away to Lviv, while Natalia is determined to stay on her land, for better or for worse. She doesn’t lose hope, and even joins the local territorial army on non-combat assignments, such as clearing rubble and providing help for those most in need. Her seemingly carefree attitude becomes an act of resistance towards a situation which is getting harder day by day.

Borets adopts the observational style and point of view of her protagonist, showing sympathy for Natalia and her causes without feeling the need to pass comment from an external position. The horrors of war unfold slowly and naturally, at the pace of Natalia’s own life, but there’s also a lot of poetry to be found in seemingly small and mundane things, such as blooming flowers, casual conversations and the cycle of life that goes on and provides optimism.

In this respect, special mention should definitely be given to cinematographers Bohdan Rozumnyi and Bohdan Borysenko, who always seem to be in the right place to capture what’s going on and to execute an array of impressive panning shots. The editing duo consisting of Agata Cierniak and Mateusz Wojtyński should also be congratulated for their tight work when it comes to highlighting the contrasts between the protagonist’s challenges and optimism, all with a sense of rhythm, at a moderate pace and within a restricted runtime of just 70 minutes. The DakhaBrakha quartet’s music, meanwhile, varying from joyful ethno to tense electronica, provides an emotional landscape to complement its visual one.

Ultimately, Flowers of Ukraine is a film about war and destruction. But more than that, it’s an ode to the honest and adamant human spirit and to life and nature which keeps on going, in spite of all hardship.

A Film a Week - Oxygen Station / Kysneva stantsiia

 previously published on Cineuropa

The history of the Crimean Tatars is a long and complicated one, but the events of the 20th and 21st century, seen from the Crimean Tatar perspective, could only be described as tragic. The Tatars were affected by the Russian famine in the early 1920s and Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, only to be collectively accused of collaboration with the Nazi occupier and deported to Central Asia (mainly Uzbekistan) in the 1940s. Every attempt of protest and every effort to go back to the homeland was further punished, using the system of penal colonies in Siberia. The resistance did not completely die out, and some figures such as Mustafa Dzhemilev, nowadays a people’s deputy of the Ukrainian parliament, have kept the proverbial flame alive. He is the protagonist of Ivan Tymchenko’s historical thriller-drama Oxygen Station, which has premiered in competition at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

We first meet him as a boy (played by Danylo Bondarev) in a strange, stylised dream sequence involving a sinister-looking magician and a political conversation no child should get involved in. Later we realise that the adult Mustafa (Borys Orlov, who played Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko in the 2019 biopic Taras: Homecoming) lives in the Zyryanka penal colony in Siberia, where he fills the oxygen tanks in a facility next to criminals and ex-convicts. Although he is a good worker who does not complain much, the prosecutor Shalandin (Viktor Poltoratskyi, the same actor who plays the magician in the dream sequences) is set on pinning him down for the murder of Lunin, a local news reporter and communist provocateur. Mustafa is still labelled and remembered as an enemy of the state, although his recent protests are only recorded in the form of letters and in a personal journal.

Back in Uzbekistan, Safinar (Khrystyna Deilyk, glimpsed in Roman Bondarchuk’s Volcano) is concerned that the national hero has stopped fighting for the cause, so she boards the train from Tashkent to Moscow, not realising that KGB agents are following her. What is her final destination? Does it have anything to do with the criminal plot and the investigation of it in Siberia? And what is the role of the mysterious man Hani (Edem Ibadullaev)?

The script written by Mykhailo Brynykh (who previously collaborated with the director on the 2019 title Beshoot) runs on two parallel tracks to show that free life in the USSR was not very different from life in the gulag. Up until the very end, those two plot lines are very different in style and nature, and very far apart story-wise, which puts tremendous pressure on Tymchenko to balance and blend them into a relatively smooth whole. The opening is rather stylish, and he shows an ability to control both plots individually (the one set in Siberia follows the genre guidelines of the crime and political thriller), but a slower pace in the second act seems inevitable. However, the jumps to dream and fantasy sequences are a good solution to that problem.

Tymchenko makes the best of the components at his disposal. The performances from the ensemble are overall convincing, although the luckier actors get the “meatier” characters. The cinematography by Thomas Stokowski uses murky colours to underline decadence and the futile efforts to cover it up, and the production and the costume design remain faithful to the Cold War period, while the music composed by Jun Miyake offers short bursts of extra tension. In the end, Oxygen Station works rather well as both an issue-driven historical drama and a political thriller.

A Film a Week - One Day in Ukraine / Den' Dobrovol'ca

 previously published on Cineuropa

A darkened Metro station. Suspenseful music in the background, and a textual info card that says so much with just a few words and numbers: 13 March 2022, or the 2,943th day of the Russian-Ukrainian War. This is not some kind of speculative fiction along the lines of Valentyn Vasyanovych’s Atlantis, but merely a matter of perspective. While for the global public, the war started this February when the Russian troops invaded Ukraine, for the Ukrainians, it is a phase in the conflict that is in its ninth year now, having started when the Maidan Uprising took place. The camera moves to the better-lit, deeper layers of the station, which provides shelter for the women, children and elderly people, and continues observing life there in an unbroken, five-minute, dialogue-free, hand-held shot.

The day referred to in the title of Volodymyr Tykhyy’s One Day in Ukraine is actually the following one, 14 March, or the 2,944th day of the war. The movie directed by the filmmaker behind Maidan: Rough Cut (2014) and the founding member of the Babylon ‘13 collective, which serves as its principal production company, had its world premiere at the recently concluded Sheffield DocFest, where it bagged a Special Mention in the main competition. The topic itself and Tykhyy’s fitting direct approach to it should be enough to secure the film a future on the documentary festival circuit.

The Metro station and the people taking shelter there are just some of the things that Tykhyy and his co-cinematographers (all 12 of them) focus on. The second narrative thread follows a group of drafted soldiers and members of the territorial defence guard in their duties, from fighting to drone reconnaissance and policing the disaster-stricken areas in order to prevent looting. The third one revolves around a young woman who copes with the situation through activism, from cooking meals for the defenders to feeding stray dogs and taking part in efforts to save the pets that owners have had to leave behind.

One of Tykhyy’s points is that almost everybody does their best to support the defence effort in their own way and by their own means, but this kind of discourse focusing on the ideals of patriotism and solidarity is standard for any defensive war. What is more interesting here is something even more universal: the way our perception changes in times of distress. The things that had been unimaginable just a month ago have become the facts of daily life, while things considered quite normal, or even mundane, like video adverts and a Stop-Zemlia movie poster in the Metro station, seem like relics from the distant past.

Operating with material from different sources, Tykhyy and his co-editor Ivan Bannikov still manage to find a sense to it all and a certain style in welding it together, sometimes to considerable emotional effect. They also incorporate shots of the actual combat and the devastating consequences of it, which are usually obtained by the reconnaissance drones belonging to one group of our protagonists, and in those moments, the harrowing musical score by Mykyta Moiseiev, consisting of a pulsating beat and a synth drone imitating wind instruments, is especially effective in filling in the soundscape.

In the end, we even learn that the day has not been chosen randomly, because it also has a certain symbolic significance: in Ukraine, it is Volunteers Day, which is connected to the Maidan and post-Maidan events. Nor does One Day in Ukraine feel random, like an ordinary chronicle of wartime events, but rather like a valuable testimony of the unbreakable human spirit.

Mountains and Heaven in Between / Mizh nebom ta horamy

 previously published on Cineuropa

The title of Dmytro Hreshko’s sophomore feature-length documentary, Mountains and Heaven in Between, suits the film’s location, the village of Kolochava in the Transcarpathian region in south-west Ukraine, tremendously well. Seen from above in the opening drone shot, all snowy, it certainly is a place of heavenly beauty. But as one of the film’s protagonists, a paramedic from a nearby town responding to a call from the village, says, “Beauty is a cruel mistress.” And that, too, is correct, as we shall see in the subsequent 70 minutes of the film’s running time.

Mountains and Heaven in Between premiered recently at the Krakow Film Festival as part of the programme of another festival, Docudays UA, which was hosted in the Polish city owing to the Russian attack on Ukraine. Sheffield DocFest has now hosted its international premiere.

Shot in the aforementioned location in the winter of 2020, which was marked by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the documentary studies the life of the village’s inhabitants and the interventions of a few ambulance crews. At first, the pandemic seems like a distant echo from the news reports, and in the village itself, it is only present as a nuisance (there are protocols to be followed) or as a joke for some of the inhabitants, who state that they regularly vaccinate themselves with vodka. The ambulance crews know the truth, but they do not get into arguments with their patients.

The reason for this is that they have some actual work to do that is not necessarily COVID-related, and usually, the motives for their interventions are the illnesses that the elderly people suffer from, like high blood pressure, heart problems, general weakness and injuries, or the consequences of alcohol consumption. They cannot deny medical help to those who call on them. Also, given that the road to the village is challenging and usually covered in snow during the winter, their job is particularly hard. But they do their best to keep their spirits up, even in the most bizarre of situations.

During this period of time, the villagers live their “old normal” lives, and get involved in events such as religious festivities, weddings and others that take place as planned. However, it is only a matter of time before the virus finds its way to this secluded village surrounded by mountains.

With news of the ongoing war nudging the pandemic out of the spotlight, Mountains and Heaven in Between might seem a bit dated, but it is still a well-made documentary that deserves our attention. Hreshko, who also served as the cinematographer, has a keen eye and a sympathetic ear, which suits his observational style really well and lets the characters breathe in their natural dynamics. Also, Mountains and Heaven in Between bears some similarities, topic- and style-wise, with his previous works, the feature-length documentary Snow Leopard of the Carpathians (2019), about mountain rescuers in the same region, and the short documentary Save Me, Doctor (2020), which kept its focus on an ambulance crew in Kyiv one New Year’s Eve. But despite this, it does not feel derivative at all.

The end result is an unexpectedly warm and astonishingly beautiful documentary, masterfully edited by Hreshko and Viktor Malyarenko, with a tension-inducing, folklore-themed soundtrack by the Hudaki Village Band and Wedding Detsa, which steers the viewers’ emotions in the desired directions. But one of its most significant achievements is its hopefulness, despite the gravity of the situation, and the knowledge of the tragedy that occurred after the pandemic.