Oleg Zagorodnii is sitting in the cafe he owns in Kyiv, beneath a brightly coloured painting of Aladdin smiling down from the wall behind. “It is just me now, no baristas,” says the Ukrainian actor via video call. “People come. I make them coffee, give them dessert. They are happy to feel some kind of normal life. They sit in the cafe, we play music, we speak. Of course, all we talk about is war.”
Zagorodnii has twice attempted to enlist in the army, only to be told that there are currently more volunteers than equipment. The best he can do is make appeals on social media for bulletproof vests, and use the cafe as a place to pass on food, supplies and military uniforms. “I try to do what I can in this terrible time,” he says.
It was only a year ago that the 34-year-old rented a small cinema in the city to screen the cold war love story Firebird for his family and friends. In this stirring British-Estonian production, Zagorodnii, who has the looks of a 1940s matinee idol, stars as Roman, a soon-to-be-married fighter pilot who falls for a young conscript, Sergey, played by Britain’s Tom Prior, after they meet at a military base in Soviet-occupied 1970s Estonia. Based on the autobiography of the late Sergey Fetisov, Firebird might resemble any tale of forbidden desire – except that Sergey and Roman face more than simply scandal should their relationship be discovered. The Soviet-era setting lends the film a distinctive thriller element: think of it as The Love Lives of Others.
When Zagorodnii landed the part, it was on the condition that he could master English in the three months before shooting began. “I knew only, ‘Hello, I am Oleg from Ukraine, my English very bad,’” recalls the actor. He also had to do five days of shooting practice. “So now, if someone gives me a gun, I know what to do with it.”
The war is never far from our conversation. “My agent found me the job on Firebird,” he continues. “But now I want to shame him because he supports this Russian aggression. He wrote to me, ‘Oleg, keep it easy, we will make you free from Zelenskiy and then we will live in a normal friendly country.’ He thinks America is doing all this! That is when we stop our discussion.”
Despite the initial language barrier between the two leads, the Estonian director Peeter Rebane knew Zagorodnii would be perfect as Roman. “It wasn’t just Oleg’s look but the way he held himself,” he says. “Tom is sensitive, artistic. Oleg has this matter-of-fact fighter-pilot quality. In hindsight, it helped that they were forced to communicate through looks and gestures at first, because that’s how it would have been between Sergey and Roman.”
Rebane first encountered Fetisov’s book a decade ago. “I was amazed,” says the 48-year-old film-maker. “Being gay was a criminal offence. After it was decriminalised with the fall of the Soviet Union, it was still seen as abnormal.” Rebane knew he was gay at the age of nine. “But even by the time I came out to my mother in my early 20s, her first reaction was still, ‘It’s OK, we can get help.’”
The knowledge that Sergey and Roman were falling in love in the very place where he grew up has given him, he says, a new perspective on LGBT people in his home country. “I could never have imagined that this kind of love story was happening there at that time. As small kids in occupied Estonia, my best friend and I would cycle near that same base. MiGs would fly overhead and we’d literally fall off our bikes.”
That memory calls to mind one of the film’s more irreverent moments: a cut from Sergey and Roman in the throes of passion to a pair of fighter jets whooshing overhead, which puts a knowing spin on the old, sexually suggestive image of a train thundering into a tunnel. “We had more discussions over that than anything,” laughs Rebane. “A German critic who saw an early version told us, ‘I love the film but this shot kills it.’ But I wanted Firebird to seem as though it was made in the 1970s rather than now.”
When he cast Prior, who played Stephen Hawking’s teenage son in The Theory of Everything, he got more than just a leading man. The actor suggested changes to the script, which led to him co-writing with Rebane a series of new drafts. These foregrounded the oppressive, paranoid conditions under which Sergey and Roman were forced to live. As they tried to raise funding to make the film, Prior also became co-producer and music supervisor, later having a hand in the editing. The pair subsequently established a distribution company to release Firebird in the UK. If the actor doesn’t show up at screenings to personally glad-hand each cinemagoer, it will be a shock.
For all his multitasking, Prior’s passion for Firebird ultimately comes back to the role of Sergey. “It resonated instantly with me,” says the 31-year-old. “He has this radical quality of following his heart at all costs. We chose very consciously not to show him full of self-doubt and shame, qualities often associated with this kind of story. That’s something I also embrace. I’m not very good at lying to myself.”
He and Rebane travelled to Moscow in 2016 to meet Fetisov, finding his company every bit as joyful as his prose. “Some of the people who were closest to him didn’t know his story,” says Prior. “He certainly wasn’t ashamed of who he was. He openly flirted with a male waiter when we were in a restaurant in Moscow. Any suffering he experienced was not in relation to his identity.”
Fetisov’s death in 2017 at the age of 64 only hardened their resolve to tell his story. “We had made a promise to him,” says Rebane. Fetisov’s only stipulation, recalls Prior, was that “the film should be about love, not politics. Of course, it’s going to be received in a more political way now. But we wanted to make a universal story about what it means to go after love at any cost.”
Remarkably for a film with such overtly gay content, several exterior scenes were filmed in Moscow. “An amazing local production company paid the right people and somehow made that happen,” says Prior. “We still don’t fully understand.” Even more surprising was the picture’s acceptance last year by the city’s film festival, though only the first of its scheduled screenings went ahead. “After that,” adds Prior, “there was a complaint about it being ‘homosexual propaganda’. We had 93 press articles written about it, all but one of which were negative. One headline translated as, ‘An Estonian, a Brit and a Ukrainian shame Moscow.’ Another called the film ‘a punch in the face of the Russian soldier’. It wasn’t technically banned but all tickets were cancelled. The film played to an empty auditorium.”
An unexpected consequence of the invasion of Ukraine is that some countries have expressed a reluctance to release Firebird now that the appetite for Russian stories is negligible. Prior is justifiably flabbergasted at this. “Russia silenced this film,” he says. “They don’t want it shown. So to not screen it is kind of doing what Putin wants.” Getting the message out is currently his priority, though he concedes it won’t be easy. “Someone online said, ‘Why would you go and watch a Russian movie right now?’” Throughout our conversation, Prior has been eloquent and articulate. Only now do words fail him. “It’s like… arrrgghh!”
For Zagorodnii, the invasion has made talking about Firebird bittersweet. “It is like it’s from another world, you know? Sergey and Roman are ready to die for their love. And in Ukraine, we are ready to die for our freedom, our land, our people. Before war, I built plans for my future. Now I understand my dreams have died because I must stay here and be with my people. I don’t know anything now about the future. I understand only that every day is more death, more destruction. Before this, we were independent. We didn’t need help. We needed only one thing: don’t touch us. I can’t understand why Russia did this.”
He rubs his face, suddenly exhausted. I mumble something hopelessly inadequate about the world supporting Ukraine. “We feel your support,” he says sadly. “But how can this happen?”
• Firebird is in cinemas from 22 April
