Porcelain War: The Transformative Power of Art… and Bullets
By Liz Braun
Rating: B+
Near the end of Porcelain War there’s a magnificent shot of a huge field of sunflowers in the countryside. It’s right next to another large piece of land full of new graves. That’s the ongoing juxtaposition of beauty and destruction in this documentary about artists called upon to defend their culture and their beloved Ukraine.
Directed by Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev, Porcelain War begins with the note that nearly all the footage was shot by the subjects of the movie — Slava Leontyev, his wife Anya Stasenko and their close friend Andrey Stefanov. Leontyev’s wonderful little dog Frodo is also a key player.
The film’s first chapter is an introduction to Slava and Anya and their art, an introduction which includes their keen interest in nature. They explore the fields and forests near Kharkiv, a town about 25 miles from the Russian border, where they have lived since the invasion of Crimea forced them out of their previous home (and precious garden.)
With them is their friend Andrey Stefanov, also an artist; he has sent his wife and children out of the country to Lithuania for their own safety. Andrey has stopped painting since the war began, but he and Slava have decided that they should make a film about what it’s like to be in this war.
Slava and Anya, artists, lifelong friends and partners, live together and work together.
Drawing heavily on nature, they create magical little porcelain animals — tiny dragons, intricate snails and other critters — that are molded by Slava and painted in the most charming fashion by Anya. Her paintings on the tiny surfaces of each porcelain animal include entire stories in miniature; animation brings some of those paintings to life in the course of the film and it’s delightful to witness.
Somehow all this communing with nature morphs into scenes of Slava narrating his role in teaching local citizens how to become soldiers. It’s now May of 2022; the movie introduces a handful of his weapons-training students, including a dairy farmer, furniture salesman, a graphic designer and an IT businesswoman — ordinary people, under siege.
The war and its attendant carnage are not far away, but even in the midst of acres of destroyed buildings and footage of Russian tanks being blown up, the film is oddly small in scale, and personal. That’s the point, no doubt. Porcelain War shows real people suddenly thrust into the most bizarre and violent of circumstances. It’s as if none of them can quite believe this is really happening to them. Everything is on a human scale.
That even holds true during a tense sequence shot on a bodycam involving some of the soldiers trained by Slava moving through destroyed buildings as they work to support the infantry.
Porcelain War is sometimes heavy-handed in spelling out its own higher meaning, but it is a rare look at the reality of war and the ordinary people compelled to defend their freedom and their way of life. (The more basic scramble for survival is spelled out by Andrey, who briefly has centrestage as he describes the terrifying journey involved in getting his wife and twin daughters out of the country.)
Slava, meanwhile, closes the film, saying, “If the future exists for us, if we don’t disappear, then it was worth it,” and a viewer’s devout hope is that he and Anya can soon return to nature for solace and subject matter.
The transformative power of art, however, is small consolation to the families of the dead. That’s always the problem with material pertaining to the indomitable human spirit, isn’t it? To be unyielding requires something dreadful to be unyielding against, the invasion of Ukraine being a prime example. And it’s easy to anticipate, following the U.S. election, that the situation in Ukraine will only get worse.
So yes, lovely film this, but most of the world would be happier to view that art without the war part. Porcelain War was the Grand Jury Prize winner in the documentary section at Sundance this year.
Porcelain War. Directed by Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev, written by Aniela Sidorska, Brendan Bellomo, Paula DuPre’ Pesmen and Slava Leontyev. With Slava Leontyev, Anya Stasenko, Andrey Sefanov and Frodo the dog. In theatres in Toronto and Ottawa December 6 and in other Canadian markets thereafter.