Award-winning Ukrainian filmmaker Valentyn Vasyanovych (“Atlantis”) heads to the Toronto Film Festival with his latest feature, “To the Victory!,” a semi-autobiographical tale about broken families and fractured lives set after the defeat of Russian forces by the Ukrainian army. The film world premieres in the festival’s Platform section.
“To the Victory!” is a work of speculative fiction that takes place in a post-war Ukraine, where the survivors of the Russian invasion attempt to rebuild their lives in a liberated country that, as they soon discover, may not quite be the homeland they longed for. A Ukraine-Lithuania co-production that’s produced by ForeFilms, Arsenal Films and M-Films, it’s written and directed by Vasyanovych, who also stars in the lead role. Best Friend Forever is handling world sales.
Vasyanovych plays Roman, a luckless director who’s out of work and trying to shoot his latest film in a country whose dwindling population is still traumatized by the war. While his wife and daughter build a new life in Vienna, Roman stays behind — confused, restless and convinced that things will get better. Despite his wife’s efforts to lure him to Austria, Roman insists on toughing it out in Ukraine until his latest film comes together.
The meta-fiction that follows is a story of a filmmaker who, like Vasyanovych, finds it all but impossible to tell a story that isn’t about the war. Surrounded by friends experiencing their own anxiety brought on by family separations and marital strife, they make a low-budget, largely improvised movie that attempts to capture their strange new reality.
Speaking to Variety ahead of the movie’s Toronto premiere, Vasyanovych says “To the Victory!” is “not an autobiographical film,” per se, so much as “a prediction of a potential autobiography in the future.” It is a film shot in the midst of the war’s uncertainty that wrestles with the even greater uncertainty to come.
Made with a skeleton crew of just six or seven people — all friends of the director — who both appeared as actors in the film and took turns behind the camera, the production was a “supportive” endeavor, says Vasyanovych, describing it as a “huge psychological release” that enabled the group, however briefly, to forget about the reality of the war. “It really helped to distract [us] from other thoughts,” the director says. “It was a kind of collective psychotherapy.”
The improvised nature of the production was born in part out of practical necessity. Early on, Vasyanovych had cast a professional in the lead role, only to realize that the actor — who was a member of Ukraine’s armed forces — could be called back to the frontline at any time. “It was absolutely impossible to do it the typical way with actors,” says Vasyanovych, who had to overcome his initial reluctance before finally agreeing to appear on camera.
The director also recognized that trying to depict the immediacy of the war through fiction would prove inadequate, noting that his compatriot Oleh Sentsov’s experimental documentary “Real” — which used footage shot with a GoPro on the war’s frontline — was “much more creative” than anything he could’ve pulled off with a production crew in Kyiv.
Instead, Vasyanovych set the events of “To the Victory!” one year in the future, envisioning his country’s eventual triumph over Russian forces to focus on what comes next — on the complex task of rebuilding a nation once survival is no longer the animating principal of daily life. Like the director, who was separated from his family at the war’s outset, many Ukrainians have struggled with depression and other mental health issues, while an estimated 5 million of his countrymen have left since Russia’s full-scale invasion in Feb. 2022. There is no telling how many will return once an eventual peace deal is signed.
“It’s important to start thinking now about when the war is over,” Vasyanovych insists, adding that his “biggest fear” is a return to a status quo dominated by populist politics and commonplace distractions from daily struggles. That extends to his concerns for the country’s movie industry, noting how tempting it could be for Ukrainian directors “to make propaganda films and stupid comedies” rather than “reflect on the trauma” wrought by the war.
“Culture really matters,” says Vasyanovych, citing the development of a robust national identity — through cinema and other forms of popular culture — as a bulwark against foreign provocation. “If we had a strong culture…Russia would have never attacked us. I know it’s quite controversial. But the only thing that really protects you from being eaten by bigger neighbors is when you’re different, and the neighbor knows that you’re different.”
For more than three years, Ukrainian soldiers, conscripts and ordinary civilians have given their lives to defend their country’s borders, and Vasyanovych is speaking to Variety just days before the latest onslaught of Russian missiles on Kyiv. The director says he is haunted by a single question: “What happens [if] all of the sacrifices come to nothing?”
“We Ukrainians don’t believe in hope after everything that’s happened,” he continues. “Hope is not the strongest part of our mentality. Because if you have hope, you have disappointment. We don’t want to be disappointed. If you believe in something, it’s highly likely that you’ll be disappointed. The history of our country drives us to that [conclusion].”
variety.com
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