Highlighting the intimate relationship between cinema and political culture, Olga Birzul surveys the landscape of Ukrainian documentary films with young protagonists. Marked by sensitivity and commitment, this cinematic trend reflects the turbulent conditions in which Ukrainian children are becoming adults.
In 1947, the German sociologist and film critic Siegfried Kracauer published his book From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. The work is a study on how popular cinema reflects the fears and desires that are hidden in the collective unconscious. Kracauer demonstrates how the poetics of German Expressionism, the dominant film style between 1915 and 1925 in Germany, mirrored the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship in the psychology of the masses. Kracauer’s theory became extraordinarily influential and inspired scholars to appraise critically the dark sides of cinematography and its power to shape social consciousness.
I read this book while preparing for Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival. Immersed in the multifaceted world of documentaries, while selecting films for the annual programme, I was searching for answers to my own questions. I wished to understand how audiences engage emotionally with what they are watching and why, despite all the lessons of the twentieth century, documentary film still has great power as a means of propaganda. This was already a few years into the undeclared war Russia had launched in eastern Ukraine. The Kremlin was still openly detaining hundreds of Ukrainian political prisoners, yet film festivals in Europe and North America kept insistently showing Russian films that misrepresented their country’s military actions in Ukraine, or exalted the mysterious ‘Russian soul’ incapable of defying its own Leviathans.[1] While watching contemporary Russian cinema, I felt as though Kracauer were speaking directly to me. I was both horrified and motivated to write an educational book about the film industry.
The book would be for adolescents, since this was back in the time when Russian pop culture was insinuating itself into the minds of Ukrainian youth. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s adults were mostly making light entertainment films for television, and not meeting young people’s cultural needs. I wanted to free cinema from the shackles of entertainment in teenagers’ minds and help young people fashion their own protective mechanisms against manipulation. My book was eventually published in 2024, with the deliberately simple title, Your Book about Cinema. It was the first Ukrainian young adult non-fiction book about cinema, gathering important information about the history, nature, and ethics of the film industry. The book also outlines the theories of Kracauer, which I know for certain have not lost their relevance, because recognising stereotypes, xenophobia, and propaganda in films are essential skills to learn when growing up.
When Kateryna Gornostai’s Stop-Zemlia, which I consider the first worthy example of a coming-of-age film in Ukraine, first premiered at the Berlinale film festival in 2021, I knew it was time to start writing my book. Finally, a watchable film had appeared in Ukraine that spoke frankly about the challenges of growing up. What is more, it did so while portraying the local context: the film features a young protagonist suffering from the trauma caused by the war in Ukraine’s east. The director avoided pitting adults and children against each other according to the conventions of the genre, instead portraying parents trying to raise children in extraordinary conditions with marked sensitivity. The film feels particularly candid because the main roles were played by ordinary teenagers whom the director had scouted, and not professional actors.
Why did Gornostai’s film hit such a nerve at the time? The answer to this question lies both in the director’s background in documentary filmmaking and within the phenomenon of Ukrainian documentary cinema in general. If each national cinema has its own distinctive features and achievements, then I would propose that contemporary, post-independence Ukrainian cinema is defined by auteur documentary film.
Ukrainian culture holds much tragedy within its past, and Ukrainian cinema is no exception; for more than half of the last century, Ukrainian cinematographers worked under the conditions of Soviet censorship and forced Russification. I wish I could say that the Ukrainian film industry finally came into its own when the country gained its long-dreamed-of independence in 1991, but this was not the case. Instead, if one were to chart the development of Ukrainian film over this period, it would probably resemble a cardiogram image of an arrhythmic heartbeat, where Ukrainian film production had steep spikes of growth and drops in activity, corresponding to the political disturbances and movements of civil resistance over this period.
It was the Euromaidan Revolution in 2013 to 2014 that gave Ukrainian art cinema a new sound and a new heartbeat. The revolution bonded the nation’s filmmakers around common values and attracted the attention of international audiences to Ukrainian film. If one counts the number of awards and honours granted to Ukrainian films at top film festivals between 2014 and 2024, creative documentary has a stronger record than feature cinematography. This is partly explained by technical aspects of filmmaking: documentary films usually require a lower budget, a smaller team, and less time to produce. But the demand for documenting real life on film in Ukraine was primarily tied to the complex changes in the nation’s political processes as citizens began to take more responsibility for their state government. After the Euromaidan Revolution, filmmakers felt a personal responsibility to induce change in society and directed their lenses onto the ordinary people who were making history around them. Audiences too were experiencing a gradual mass awakening from the illusion of peaceful Russian–Ukrainian kinship peddled by pop culture and television while riding a wave of euphoria in their victory over the pro-Russian Yanukovych regime.
In the face of many years of Russian aggression, economic instability, and a demand for revitalising national identity, documentary film became a refuge and a forge for independent Ukrainian filmmakers. While documentary cinema made during the period of the Russian–Ukrainian war features a wide variety of styles, genres, and issues, I have noticed an overwhelming focus on children and young people. These films are like puzzle pieces: one can construct a comprehensive representation of the turbulent reality in which children in Ukraine were and are growing up.
I propose to assemble this collective portrait along the lines of geography, travelling from west to east, starting with Living Fire, made by Ostap Kostyuk in 2015. Living Fire is one of the few Ukrainian films of the period in which its setting has still not been infiltrated by war. The director explores Ukrainian reality through the archaic tradition of shepherding, which embodies a cultural code familiar throughout Europe. The film follows three generations of men who live in the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine. These men are the bearers of the Hutsul shepherding tradition, which is on the verge of extinction. Ten-year-old Ivanko, the youngest of the three subjects, is the viewer’s main guide into his family’s profession. The boy’s summer holidays are spent among picturesque mountain landscapes and magical mists while he herds flocks of skittish sheep. Through the eyes of this child, we see the beauty in these men’s traditional craft. The director creates a sophisticated and poetic film about the threads that weave together past and future generations; he overcomes the genre constraints of an ethnographic film with his observations on the fluidity of life. Living Fire finishes on an open ending about the fragility of cultural continuity with the threats posed by modern life.
Roman Bondarchuk’s film Dixieland, also finished in 2015, features a group of young musicians in Kherson, in Ukraine’s south, and highlights the danger of Ukraine losing its creative youth to opportunities abroad. The plot centres around a children’s orchestra, the members of which are skilful jazz musicians who perform at city festivals. One day, they find out some tragic news about their beloved teacher, Semen Mykolaiovych Ryvkin. The loss of their teacher forces them to grow up quickly and to make a professional choice. In the film’s finale we see that the most talented of the teenagers decide to continue their music studies abroad. The film foreshadows the demographic crisis experienced by Ukraine seven years later, when the Russian army invades, inflicting particular devastation on Kherson and the surrounding region.
Next, we move to the east of Ukraine: perhaps the most optimistic documentary film about the life of teenagers in this region is Iryna Tsilyk’s The Earth is Blue as an Orange, released in 2020. This is a film about film — or rather about how documentary cinematography itself can be a form of resistance against injustice, can influence surrounding reality, and can engender hope for change. The film depicts a family from a place near the frontline in the Donetsk region. The mother and her four children are creative: they play various musical instruments and decide to shoot a homemade film about the war and how it has changed their lives. The film is a form of art therapy that helps the family reflect on and process their trauma, while also letting one of the daughters discover her future profession, which she later pursues at Ukraine’s top film school. The manifest value of The Earth is Blue is its focus on the caring relationships within this family. These relationships speak in the universal language of film, intelligible in every corner of the world, so it is no surprise that the film won many awards and had success at the international box office.
The protagonists of the film We Will Not Fade Away also live in the east, in the towns of Zolote and Stanytsia Luhanska that were near the frontline before 2022 and later became occupied. Like other teenagers who live in places not surrounded by war, they dream of adventures and travel. Their wishes come true when they receive an unexpected offer to visit the Himalayas. Director Alisa Kovalenko closely observes how the five teenagers prepare for their long trip and simultaneously acquaints us with a daily life spent cheek by jowl with war. Even as we follow the film’s protagonists as they scale some of the world’s highest mountains, we remain aware that the far greater challenge of war awaits them at home. Kovalenko started filming before the full-scale invasion and, after an interruption, she finished in 2023. Furthermore, the film ultimately became a piece of evidence of Russia’s war crimes against Ukraine: when these areas became occupied, some of the young people in the film were not able to evacuate from the Russian-controlled territories. Their fate is still unknown, like that of many other Ukrainian children who have been deported or illegally abducted by Russia. According to the latest estimates of Bring Kids back UA, the number of these children is more than 19,500. We Will Not Fade Away seems an optimal symbolic conclusion for this excursion through Ukrainian documentary cinema. The film reminds us that, for Ukrainians, culture has acquired a dimension of a struggle for our nation’s survival.
Your Book about Cinema, published in the midst of all-out war, reflects the way young Ukrainians are growing up in a world where film and real life are closely intertwined. The book is also my own personal document of the war. In it is etched the pain of the eternal loss of the person I cared about most in the world. The book is dedicated to the memory of my husband, Viktor Onysko. Within it he introduces the reader to his profession, since he was a talented film editor. At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Viktor put his career on hold and volunteered to defend the Ukrainian state. On 30 December 2022, my husband was killed in action during a combat mission in the Donetsk region.
Viktor often said that there was no greater cinema than real life. In these dark times, I stubbornly hold on to his wisdom, courage, and his contribution to contemporary Ukrainian cinema. The last two films, the editing of which Viktor was involved in but never managed to complete — Fragments of Ice, by Maria Stoianova, and The Editorial Office by Roman Bondarchuk — were released with a dedication to his memory.
Now, books, films, and music preserve memories of the lives of our family members and friends that have been cut short. In the fourth year of resistance against Russian atrocities, I can no longer imagine a future. Yet there are things of which I am still certain. If someone were to write a psychological critique of Ukrainian cinema according to Kracauer’s method, I know that we Ukrainian adults will not have to face shame before our children. This is because we, as a society, have done as much as we can to protect them from coming under a Russian-fascist dictatorship. Both in film and in real life.
Endnotes
[1] Reference to Andrey Zvyagintsev’s 2014 film Leviathan, about an ordinary Russian man’s trials at the hands of the monstrous machinery of the state. The film alludes both to the biblical story of Job and to Thomas Hobbes’s classic work proposing a human propensity to give up personal liberty to a sovereign authority in exchange for collective security.
Olga Birzul is a film curator, culture manager, as well as a journalist and editor for Ukrainian cultural media. From 2009 to 2019, as part of the Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival team, she worked as a festival programmer, co-ordinator of the education platform Docu/Class, and curator of special programmes and the Docu/Art section about the interconnection of art and cinema. She also co-ordinated the festival’s cultural diplomacy project ‘See Ukraine’ (2016 to 2018). From 2019 to 2021, Olga was Head of Films at The Ukrainian Institute. She lectures on the history and theory of non-fiction film, and often serves as a consultant to documentary filmmakers. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, she curates film programmes about Ukraine for international cultural projects. Her book about the theory and history of cinema for teenagers, Your Book about Cinema, was published in 2024.
Image: Stanislav Turina, Drawing (special for the London Ukrainian Review), 2025
