Babylon’13’s credo of a “cinema of civil society” names the double duty of this democratic film collective: on one side, to bear witness to the moment, document state crimes, uphold the revolutionary spirit, and on the other, to bear that witness as filmmakers, each with a distinct cinematic sensibility of their own.
Volodymyr insists that “from the very beginning we were making cinema,” holding to a principle that captured both what unfolded in front of the camera and the cultural code and artistic gaze each filmmaker brought to the work, the two expanding both the scope and the versatility of what was documented. That dual approach had a magnetic pull. There were many who joined Babylon’13 who were compelled to witness, but just as many who arrived with little experience of cinema but a strong aspiration toward it. The work the collective created and distributed made room for both.
When police violently detained students, Andrii was among them. While in custody, he texted Volodymyr that he wanted to make films, and the very next day after his release, he was already making his debut Brick by Brick (2014), a detailed chronicle of people building the barricade. The short was edited by Roman, who by then already held the status of the collective’s editor and has since become one of Babylon’13’s “archival keepers.” For all three, revisiting Maidan carries a specific emotional weight. “While Volodymyr had approached Maidan with industry experience, sensing the need to institutionalize, there passed mine and Roman’s youth, and it was simply the best place to be,” Andrii says. It’s a place where they found love and friends and where they became filmmakers.
Since then, the revolutionary spirit has kept pace with the escalating war. The archive and the collective’s purpose have grown alongside it as they have taken on bigger fronts to reach, bigger events to record, bigger histories to keep. That expansion and evolution alongside escalation became part of Babylon’13’s DNA. From Maidan to the ongoing war, short-form documentaries covering a wide range of historical events and micro-level stories remind the world of the war by bringing a human perspective to dehumanized regions. Their gradually expanding output also bears witness to the ways war and camera technology co-evolved, inevitably bleeding into Babylon’13’s shifting formal register.
The collective’s feature-length works most vividly demonstrate the heterogeneity of its aesthetic and political practices, each film emerging from a distinct constellation of access, methodology, and archival engagement. Andrii and Volodymyr see Roman’s first feature, War Note (2020), as an early pride of the collective. The former calls this visceral montage-mosaic assembled from frontline soldiers’ footage “one of the most right and honest sayings about the war, made when, for many, the war still remained little more than background noise.” At the same time, the collective’s understanding and connections with the frontline, and simply having eyes all over the country, made possible such formally specific feature ideas as Volodymyr Tykhy’s One Day in Ukraine (2022) or Independence Day (2023), which each deploy a one-day-event concept with nearly a dozen DPs across various locations. The collective’s own prolific output is most felt in extra-durational character observations, such as Yuliia Hontaruk’s twelve-year-in-the-making To Die To Live (2026), which premieres at this year’s KVIFF—a radical case of what Volodymyr encourages from his fellows: to spend enough time with the heroes they document.