“Porcelain War,” a film by directors Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev. Showing in theaters now. In Ukrainian, with English and Russian subtitles.
MINNEAPOLIS — I saw “Porcelain War,” a recent documentary film made in Ukraine, early in January. As a member of the Socialist Workers Party I have been inspired for years reading about the determined resistance of Ukrainian working people against Moscow’s invasion and murderous war.
We campaign among fellow working people in the U.S., showing them the Militant and discussing why workers should support the Ukrainian workers’ fight to defend their national culture and national sovereignty. I recommend this film to anyone who wants to get a close-up look at the lives of everyday Ukrainians waging that fight.
“Porcelain War” focuses on hard-fought resistance against Vladimir Putin’s drive to wipe out the Ukrainian nationality. Alongside their courageous military defense, making and enjoying art is another form of cultural resistance and resilience. It is part of what makes Ukraine Ukrainian. Among the tens of thousands of workers on the front lines are writers, musicians, actors and artists. “When they erase these people, they erase Ukraine,” Anya Stasenko says in the film.
Stasenko is one of the three main characters in the film, along with Slava Leontyev (who is also one of the film’s directors) and Andrey Stefanov (the film’s main cinematographer). All three are real people, and the film is about their lives.
Stasenko and Leontyev live in an apartment in Kharkiv, not far from the Russian border. They are lifelong companions in art and in love. Though they are now living among rubble, blackouts and the sounds of nearby explosions they find time for art and pleasure.
Putin’s aggression followed them to Kharkiv after they fled Crimea in 2014. Together they create and paint magical porcelain creatures and place them amid the rubble of the war for others to find. And they stand strong in face of the war taking place in their backyard.
Leontyev is also a member of the Ukrainian Special Forces, providing weapons training for workers who want to become soldiers. While he is away, Stasenko stays home, painting on their porcelain creatures. They come to life and help tell the story of the Ukrainian people and the war — loss, hope and defiance.
“Porcelain is like Ukraine,” Leontyev says, “easy to break, but impossible to destroy.”
On the front line, the documentary joins him and his military unit, code-named Saigon. All its members are volunteers from the area, including a dairy farmer and computer programmer.
The documentary shows what Stefanov, a painter as well as a filmmaker, has to go through to help get his wife and daughters to Lithuania, a long and precarious journey. His story shows us what lengths people will go to keep their family safe, and how war tears families apart.
The soldiers’ fear, compassion and bravery all strike us when Leontyev’s unit takes on an assignment in Bakhmut. Scenes from the GoPro camera they are using bring the audience into the battlefield. One soldier laments over how the Russian military’s murderous conduct of the war involves such a waste of human life. They send their soldiers out as bait, doomed, in hopes the Ukrainian forces will shoot them and reveal their own location.
I recommend this film. A central theme is that war is ugly, but justified and necessary for the Ukrainian people to fight for their freedom. “The stories we tell through art, they are also our resistance,” Leontyev says.
Stasenko explains a bright spot in all this destruction and death is that she had no idea how many heroes walked among them. The war has brought out amazing qualities in the most unexpected people, she says.
The film won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival in 2024 and has just been nominated for a Best Documentary Feature Oscar this year.