{"id":131650,"date":"2025-05-25T21:38:13","date_gmt":"2025-05-25T21:38:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/131650\/"},"modified":"2025-05-25T21:38:13","modified_gmt":"2025-05-25T21:38:13","slug":"an-austere-anti-war-documentary-on-ukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/131650\/","title":{"rendered":"An Austere Anti-War Documentary on Ukraine"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tBillowing gray smoke intermingles with moody cloud cover, while scores of grim-faced Ukrainian citizens watch the skies, arms folded. The visual opening salvo of \u201cMilitantropos<\/a>,\u201d directed by Yelizaveta Smith, Alina Gorlova and Simon Mozgovyi, could be the opening scene of a Hollywood disaster movie, albeit one of the more dour and serious-minded sorts. Moments later, we\u2019re at a train station and the visual reference switches: Huddled masses are being evacuated from Kviv to Vienna with their suitcases and children. We\u2019re setting up a heartfelt period drama, perhaps. And then, in close-up, a bulldozer turns over rubble, and a family photograph is glimpsed in the debris, a tattered symbol of what has been lost. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe makers of \u201cMilitantropos\u201d seem well aware of how the visual touchstones of war have been borrowed or appropriated by cinema, and their film loops us back around again, confronting us with the source images. The neologism that gives the film its title, coined for and by this film, is defined on-screen as \u201ca persona adopted by humans when entering a state of war.\u201d Such textual musings return periodically and are part of a toolbox of techniques aligning this doc with formally experimental work, despite ripped-from-the-headlines subject matter which might lead you to expect a more standard-issue approach.<\/p>\n

\n\tWritten with Maksym Nakonechnyi, the director of the bleak drama \u201cButterfly Vision,\u201d \u201cMilitantropos\u201d repeatedly considers the effect of war on children. The bubble any parent tries to build for their child is always temporary, as the illusion that the world is for the most part a benign or even magical place must inevitably be dismantled \u2014 but whether that dismantling is a gradually managed part of growing up or the quick and brutal consequence of events beyond the parent\u2019s control is brought home here with vivid urgency.<\/p>\n

\n\tA school where children have been forced to stay, with artwork on the walls \u2014 some of which are normal kids\u2019 drawings and others of which depict bombings \u2014 gives a grounded sense of place to the horrific childhoods endured by young Ukrainians. This film\u2019s anthropological interest in how people are shaped by an ongoing immersion in a state of war is simultaneously deeply personally felt and conveyed with a sense of analytical remove. Perhaps that\u2019s partly the consequence of having been directed by a group: There\u2019s a balance and care here that is likely the consequence of collaboration and conversation between three director-editors also known as the Tabor Collective.<\/p>\n

\n\tOne imagines that some of those conversations must have involved the ethics of aestheticizing war. It\u2019s certainly a relevant talking point here. Do beautiful images of an ugly thing risk conferring some sort of palatability to that ugliness? It\u2019s a very specific version of the age-old debate about whether cinema tends to glamorize what it depicts. In the case of \u201cMilitantropos,\u201d it matters a lot who is doing the depicting: People who are living the reality of war over an extended period of time are arguably entitled to discover beauty where they find it. Hope springs in unlikely places, including in a grove of cherry blossoms that fill the screen toward the end of the documentary.<\/p>\n

\n\tDespite its aesthetic virtues, \u201cMilitantropos\u201d ultimately captures the dreariness of military engagement: the bloodless greys and muted khakis, the palette leached of all life and humanity. Crucially, when guns fire and bombs detonate, the documentary eschews the language of cinema: The filmmakers don\u2019t zoom in for a slow-motion shot of a man\u2019s face grimacing as he dies. You can\u2019t always quite tell what has happened, and there is no on-screen devices to help orient us in the mission. There may not even be a mission, as the feeling of senseless intermittent destruction remains palpable throughout \u201cMilitantropos.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Billowing gray smoke intermingles with moody cloud cover, while scores of grim-faced Ukrainian citizens watch the skies, arms…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":131651,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7654],"tags":[6639,2000,299,58025,657],"class_list":{"0":"post-131650","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ukraine","8":"tag-cannes-film-festival","9":"tag-eu","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-militantropos","12":"tag-ukraine"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114570638375112159","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131650\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}