Russia-Ukraine Crisis On Reel: Five Films One Should Watch To Understand The Conflict

Russia-Ukraine conflict: Russian culture and politics have long denied Ukraine’s existence as different from Russia, and Ukrainian films have for decades shown this struggle for cultural recognition.

New Delhi: ‘Ukraine Is Not Russia’ is a book written by former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and published in 2003. The four words, however, don’t just make the subject of a book but are a sentiment that drives most of Ukraine’s around 4.5 crore population, and an assertion that Russia has denied for centuries.   

Russia has always argued that Ukraine is an integral part of Russian civilisation. 

Tsar Alexander II had in the 1870s made it illegal to publish anything in the dialect that “Little Russian” spoke. He believed the language threatened the claim that Ukraine was part of Russia, according to Britannica.

President Vladimir Putin’s views are not different from that of the Russian rulers of the past. Only yesterday (Thursday, March 3), he said Ukrainians and Russians are "one people", and blamed the West for “threatening and brainwashing” Ukrainians into believing that they are different from Russians.

A distinct cultural recognition is what Ukrainians have always demanded and fought for, even when they were part of the Soviet Union.

And Ukraine’s films, documentaries and TV shows have always tried to highlight this struggle. In fact, Ukraine’s current President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had risen to public prominence riding the popularity of his political comedy, Servant of the People, a TV series he starred in. 

Five Films That Explain The Russia-Ukraine Conflict

1. Tini Zabutykh Predkiv (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors), 1965: It is called the best Ukrainian film of all times. Directed by Sergei Paradjanov, the film is a love story set in the Carpathian Mountains along the Ukrainian-Romanian border, and showcases the native culture of a hill tribe of shepherds, called the Hutsuls. The film garnered wide appreciation because it affirmed Ukraine’s distinct cultural identity, which was different from others, especially Russians. According to reports, when the film premiered in Kyiv in 1965, Ukrainian literary critic Ivan Dziuba denounced the Soviet policies of “Russification” from stage and massive riot  ensued in downtown Kyiv. Dziuba died on February 22 this year, just two days before Russia invaded Ukraine. 

While the film received international acclaim, it is said its premiere in Ukraine was delayed because director Parajanov was firm on his stand that he won’t show it in Russian translation. His argument was that the fact that language was one of the integral artistic elements of the film, which is still revered for taking the country’s fight for a cultural recognition to global stage. 

2. Kaminnyi Khrest (The Stone Cross), 1968: The film is the story of a poor peasant family in  western Ukraine’s Galicia region. Set in the late 19th century, the Leonid Osyka directorial showed the despair of the family that decides to move to Canada for a better future but feels devastated as they have to leave their native land and culture. 

It was a period when migrating to Canada or other places was common to the farmers as peasantry saw destruction at the hands of the rulers during the time leading up to the Holodomor of 1932-33 when a man-made famine killed thousands of Ukrainians. Since Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union then, the film could only hint at this reference, by showing a barren landscape throughout.

3. Maidan, 2014: The Euromaidan movement of 2013-14 is a milestone in the history of modern Ukraine. Many documentary films have been made on the street protests that forced out then president Viktor Yanukovych, who scuttled a trade agreement with the European Union days before it was scheduled to be signed, in favour of closer ties with Russia. But Maidan, the film made by Sergei Loznitsa, stands out because it views the protests through day-to-day events, showing what people are talking about while sitting in restaurants, scenes inside makeshift hospitals where the injured are being treated, and capturing the lives of people living through the revolution that managed to overthrow a government. Then president Yanukovych, who reportedly had close ties with Putin, had to flee Ukraine and he has been in exile since. Putin reportedly wants to make him the president again.

4. Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom, 2015: It’s a documentary film that presents an on-the-ground montage of the Euromaidan protests of 2013-14 that were sparked by Yanukovych government’s decision to suspend the signing of the trade agreement with the EU. Evgeny Afineevsky’s documentary follows the protestors as they demonstrate at Kyiv’s Maidan square, prompting a crackdown by government forces that killed hundreds. The film ends on a satisfying note as Yanukovych flees the country, a review by The Hollywood Reporter noted, adding: “Of course, that was not quite the end of the story.”

5. Donbass, 2018: Ukraine’s official submission for the 'Best Foreign Language Film' category of the 91st Academy Awards in 2019, the film is a collage of vignettes from Ukraine’s separatist regions. Made by award-winning director Sergei Loznitsa, who made Maidan in 2014, Donbass is a feature film, not a documentary. An “absurdist satire of the Russian propaganda machine”, as a report in The Guardian puts it, the film was denounced by Russian critics. Loznitsa created a “freakish kaleidoscope of bizarre scenes and nightmarish vignettes”, a review of the film in The Guardian noted, adding: “Here is the horror, the violence, the bureaucracy and the Orwellian propagation of fake news and an eternal war hysteria to nourish patriotism.”