‘Please go to the shelter NOW!” The text message from our lovely guide comes through at about 1am. She knows I have ignored the countless air-raid warnings that have previously popped up on my phone, but this one, she says, is a missile, not a drone or a jet. So I go to the car park beneath my hotel and am greeted by a sardonic round of applause.
It is midway through the Odesa international film festival and I am one of five judges in the “national” section. The other four judges are women – Wanda from the Czech Republic, Sahraa from Afghanistan, Lisa Marie from the UK and Alisa, who is Ukrainian. There are nine films to watch, a mixture of documentary and drama. At the end, we can award two cash prizes.
The festival has to contend with daunting problems, and its director, Anna Machukh, has successfully moved the entire thing from Odesa to the relatively safer Kyiv – and dealt with the constant electricity shutdowns. Many sections of Kyiv are down to a few hours a day and the city soundscape is massed generator noise.
With one exception, the films are all set within the context of the war with Russia. I have never been to a festival like this, in which the films are so utterly linked to the present: tense, time and place. As one film finishes, there is a missile alert and we all scurry to the nearest underground station, where escalators ferry us deep below ground and barriers open automatically, no ticket needed.
As we descend, I find myself in conversation with a Georgian film-maker. She wasn’t crazy about the film we have just watched; I thought it was a bit of a masterpiece. The conversation alerts me to something. Years back, I interviewed the guitar hero Peter Green. It was a strange conversation, and his answers only made sense later, when divorced from my questions. One thing he said was: “When you listen to a song, is it the words first? Or the tune?” For me, it is always the tune, and it’s the same with cinema. My Georgian companion was, I believe, talking about the context of the film. I had just been blown away by the cinematic vision.
As the days passed, this difference became clearer to me. The films I saw were about information. Ukraine is a country at war; its inhabitants are using cinema to tell the stories of the war and how their lives are affected. One film was about a street artist who goes back to a devastated town to see how is his murals have survived (or not). He talks to residents and they tell their often shockingly brutal stories. The whole thing was shot, like many of the others, in a matter of days.
Another film follows a small unit of soldiers who man a field gun and wait for something to happen. It doesn’t. They clean the gun, and the film is broken up into sections by black-and-white video clips of the gun in slow motion, soundtracked by heavy metal.
There was a heatwave in Kyiv when I was there. Every morning, we were invited to go to see scars left by the war: bomb sites, a museum of missile debris and cars riddled with bullets. “Aren’t you scared to be here?” was a frequent question. I wasn’t. I was more concerned with heatstroke.
Just a few weeks earlier I had been at the Cannes film festival, filming Francis Ford Coppola on the red carpet; it was impossible not to compare the two events. To be at a festival where many of the artists are in uniform and the entire audience is united by a common ideal makes one re-evaluate all kinds of notions about success and aesthetics and fashion.
Cinema, though, is a brute: it demands that you hold the audience’s attention for an hour-and-a-half and, regardless of the tragic message contained in all of the films, there was an absence of deliverance. I hoped an extraordinary film would pop up. Why would that happen? Two-and-a-half years into an invasion, with the future uncertain, what is there to deliver? But then, after all, two films arrived that were rather wonderful.
The first was a feature: Gray Bees, directed by Dmytro Moyseev – a sort of Waiting for Godot in Ukraine’s eastern zone. Two old geezers – one pro his homeland, the other not quite so much – survive in a destroyed village. It is slow, dark and, although ultimately tragic, frequently very funny.
The other was a documentary: Glyadielov, directed by Ksenia Kravtsova, featuring a famous Ukrainian photographer discussing a career documenting combat, and with a beautiful jazz score.
The speeches at the closing ceremony were long and we were in danger of missing our train as we gave out the awards and made tearful statements. During the long return journey (36 hours by train, car and plane) and in the first days back in London, I was still deeply immersed in Ukraine. It is a sad truth: war brings out the worst and the best in people.
