PORCELAIN WAR - Mark Reviews Movies

Porcelain War, Picturehouse

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 21, 2024

Slava Leontyev didn't want to fight. Nobody in Ukraine did, until Russia invaded near the beginning of 2022. Then, fighting became a necessity for Slava Leontyev, an artist living in Kharkiv with his wife and artistic collaborator Anya Stasenko, as well as the couple's cute little dog Frodo. The two were more than content to craft and paint porcelain figurines of real and mythical creatures, while taking to the nearby forest for inspiration. Now, the pair also have to keep an eye out for landmines and put up warning signs whenever they find one hidden under moss.

Porcelain War depicts the lives of these two artists and their friend Andrey Stefanov, a man who fled to Kharkiv with his wife and two daughters after Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, where the family called home, in 2014. As much as he hated to leave, Stefanov thought that was at least the end of war, and now, he's using an army of cameras both to capture footage of this city under siege and to aid civilian soldiers taking up arms against foreign aggressors.

The film, directed by Brendan Bellomo and Leontyev, is an unsettling marriage of art and war, in that there is real art being made around and, as strange as it sounds, even within combat. Stefanov is credited as the cinematographer, because most of the footage presented in this documentary was shot or arranged by him.

He records his friends, as their comfortable lives of creating those figurines become ones of trying to survive attacks by tanks and rockets, training other civilians to use rifles and other weaponry, and fending off hostilities by Russian military personnel in and near the city. The scenes of combat are terrifying, but Stefanov and Leontyev know they are almost as necessary as the defense itself. It lets us witness, not only the resilience and ingenuity of the small unit Leontyev leads, but also the devastation and sheer waste of human life happening, because an autocrat has decided the cost is worth his apparent imperial aims.

These men and women take no joy in this, because their lives were happy before the invasion. One harrowing sequence shows the unit rushing through the ruins of an apartment building, looking for sniping positions and a safe location to deploy one of several drones used for reconnaissance and makeshift bomb attacks. They find a group of about half a dozen Russian soldiers, and Leontyev explains they are scouts of a sort. They're not there to look for or fight Ukrainian defenses in any direct way. No, they've essentially been sent out to be killed, so that the rest of the Russian forces will know there is a defense and where it's situated.

That one side does that says everything one needs to know, in case it somehow isn't yet known, about the moral balance of this conflict. The on-the-ground filmmakers give us clear evidence of such actions, in such disregard for the lives of those who have been told they're fighting for the country that would use them as fodder. Leontyev mourns the very notion of it, because none of this had to happen.

At a certain point, the training and fighting take over this narrative, but the scenes of these artists, outside of combat and speaking of their desire to create, define the tone of those latter sequences, too. There is no glory or spectacle here, as body cameras capture a first-person view of a unit member rushing to get a medical kit to help an injured comrade or a drone camera captures the seemingly impossible precision of its pilot dropping an explosive ordinance into a small opening of a Russian tank.

The film's war footage is unique, because it is homemade—much like the soldiers themselves, in a way—and never sensationalized. It shows us why the fighting continues, because Russia likely did not expect that everyday people would rally to the cause of national defense as they did, and on a deeper level, seeing these tactics in practice says more about the determination of the people of Ukraine than any words could. It may not be art in any traditional sense, but if art's goal is to capture something of the human experience, this is the side of it we don't want to see.

It's a continually jarring film, because these artists are so passionate about why they create their pieces and, with those desires diminished by the threat to their lives and homes and freedom, they find this new means of creativity in combat. It's especially true of Stefanov, who cannot bring himself to paint any longer while he misses his family, who have escaped to Poland, and sees what he sees.

Indeed, we get to know Leontyev, Stasenko, and Stefanov as ordinary people, forced into this position and rising to the occasion. Stasenko continues to paint those porcelain figurines, whenever her husband has the time to make them. It becomes less and less as the months pass, the seasons change, and the Russian attacks continue. A little dragon becomes a mascot for the unit, and Stasenko's art is animated to add another layer to the ache of what has been lost and the hope that it might return again.

Porcelain War is an inherently contradictory film about the beauty of creation, the devastation of war, and how those intersect for this group of artist warriors and warrior artists. The strength of the film, then, is in seeing the art, the combat, and the people for what and who they are.

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