{"id":171035,"date":"2026-08-17T15:23:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T15:23:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/171035\/"},"modified":"2026-08-17T15:23:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-17T15:23:13","slug":"toronto-black-sunflowers-first-look-at-ukrainian-youth-coming-of-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/171035\/","title":{"rendered":"Toronto: Black Sunflowers First Look at Ukrainian Youth Coming of Age"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tJames Marcus Haney made his name as a filmmaker sneaking into Coachella, Glastonbury and other top music festivals by posing as press to get exclusive footage of pop stars and their performances.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat need to gate crash marquee festivals with his camera was captured in his 2014 feature documentary No Cameras Allowed. Now Haney is headed to the Toronto Film Festival<\/a> with Black Sunflowers, a feature documentary about Ukrainian youth coming of age amid martial law as they move between underground raves and car racing on the home front and the brutal front lines of war against Russia.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tBlack Sunflowers.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tToronto Film Festival<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd the American filmmaker has Sean Penn on board to executive produce, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. The first images for Black Sunflowers, which will have a Sept. 11 world premiere in Toronto, has young Ukrainians facing tragedy and duty as soldiers on the front lines, while they find distraction on concert dance floors, in relationships or bonding at a local watering hole.<\/p>\n

\n\tWorking with a Ukrainian film crew, Haney captures an army truck driver who races his car down city streets back home; a young amputee soldier finding freedom on a high energy rave dance floor, despite a blade\u00a0prosthesis; a young woman turning from nature photography to war photography amid the ruins of war; and still another young woman being trained to shoot a rifle as a generation of youth face compulsory military service.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tBlack Sunflowers.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tToronto Film Festival<\/p>\n

\n\tHaney, in a director\u2019s statement on the TIFF<\/a> website, recalls first arriving in Ukraine<\/a> as war reshaped everyday life: \u201cI was surprised to see how much normal life carried on, despite the war. I couldn\u2019t help but think that mainstream media is missing half of the story.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHaney\u2019s film joins a slew of other Ukraine war documentaries, including Roman Liubyi and Volodymyr Tykhyy\u2019s Time Machine Maidan<\/a>, which bowed at Sheffield, Oscar-winning filmmaker\u00a0Mstyslav Chernov<\/a>\u2018s new film,\u00a02000 Meters to Andriivka<\/a>, and Militantropos, <\/a>from co-directors Alina Gorlova, Yelizaveta Smith and Simon Mozgovyi. <\/p>\n

\n\tBlack Sunflowers, with an original score by Fred Gibson (Fred Again), Brian Eno and Koloah, is produced by Pedram Rezaee, Mikayla Jean Miller, Yevhenii Zdorovylo, Samy Mosher, Eric Maldin, Volodymyr Yatsenko and Anna Yatsenko. <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tBlack Sunflowers <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tToronto Film Festival<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tBlack Sunflowers.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tToronto Film Festival<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"James Marcus Haney made his name as a filmmaker sneaking into Coachella, Glastonbury and other top music festivals…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":171036,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[15609,48,19255,3297],"class_list":["post-171035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-toronto","tag-tiff","tag-toronto","tag-toronto-film-festival","tag-ukraine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171035\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/171036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}