Ukrainians would like to watch comedies

I’ve never heard an audience so silent.

When the credits rolled on the screener 2000 meters to AndriivkaNo one moved in the Kyiv cinema. The popcorn and beer were mostly untouched.

Directed by Mstislav Chernov, the documentary is a film about the front lines, where you feel like you are trapped in the terrifying trenches alongside the soldiers.

Watching this in Ukraine, the country under fire, the intensity of the fire is multiplied.

At the start of the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, with society mobilizing to defend itself, Ukraine had little capacity for culture. Places were closed or reused, some were attacked, and artists became refugees or soldiers.

Nearly four years later, the arts have returned, but now everything is tainted by war.

This change shocked me during my recent trip to Kyiv.

I realized that the city walls were covered with two types of posters: fundraising advertisements for troops on the front line, or films, plays and exhibitions about the war.

Andreevka It was not the only film that had great success: there were also advertisements for COpa and Alaskaanother powerful documentary that follows two combat medics in a way that is at once funny, frightening, and tragic.

There was unflinching photography too.

The old Lenin Museum, now the Ukrainian House, was hosting a huge retrospective of the work of documentary photographer Oleksandr Gladylov.

Spanning three floors of the soaring modernist building, his photographs captured the extent of Ukraine’s struggle for independence: 35 years trying to wrest itself from Russian control.

In the section dedicated to the year 2022 and beyond, he displayed pictures of the bodies of the victims on the ground to look like graves.

Some I spoke to in Kyiv are ashamed of all this.

War is their reality: it’s what keeps them awake at night, with air defense guns and missile warnings. This is all over their social media pages, and it also underlies their concerns about friends and family fighting.

It’s the last thing they want more of, on stage or screen.

But others are clearly drawn to it.

Andreevka It is Chernov’s latest production after his film From the Besieged City of Mariupol won an Oscar.

This time his focus is on a two-kilometre-long strip of land in eastern Ukraine. The soldiers call it the forest, even though it is just a line of meager trees separating them from the Russian positions. Their mission is to cross it, reclaim Andreyevka, and hang the Ukrainian national flag on the ruins.

So the men rush between the trenches, guided by soldiers in the rear who watch from drones and warn of any threat they see. They control real troops like in a computer game, but their faces are stony, and their concentration is complete.

The soldiers’ lives depend on them.

When it was over, the audience around me looked stunned.

“There was someone I knew in this movie, a soldier, and he died,” Yulia says, when people finally file out into the lobby.

She says it was a difficult hour. “I think we have to do this. We can’t forget them.”

An older man openly admits that he watched the film in tears. “Some moments were very difficult,” says Taras.

But he is sure that such films are necessary.

“Maybe people will realize that Ukraine needs all the help it can get to end this,” Taras says. “Many people have been killed because we refuse to be what we are not. We are not Russians.”

It’s not just “serious” art that deals with war these days. Musicals, the ultimate form of escapism, also exist.

On the way from the cinema, I saw a sign for the latest performances of the Kyiv Opera: Patriota rock opera in two acts.

“It’s the story of any one of us,” the director explains, a story that takes the hero on a journey through Ukraine’s modern history – from revolution to war.

All the songs are very popular anthems for Ukrainian independence, so the audience on the night of the premiere was cheering and on its feet at times. There were cheers for a policeman on stage in a big suit doing pelvic thrusts, and for a woman in a tracksuit and stockings tearing up a picture of Vladimir Putin.

It was all a million miles away from the movies watched in silence across the road.

But director Pietro Kachanov told me that even musical theater has a mission now.

He was frank: “We have to do everything to prove that Russia is our old enemy.” “The Russians are not our brothers. They are killing our people. They want to take away our freedom and we must say this.”

His team pressured him to give the show a happy ending for audiences exhausted by four years of open war, but he refused.

“This play is a tribute to those who died in this war,” he told me. “And we cannot think about our comfort when the best sons of Ukraine die.”

The same spirit is driving the current “explosion” of documentaries.

Since February 2022, Ukraine’s TV news channels have toed the official line and told reassuring stories in the name of unity. But independent filmmakers focus on the hardships.

“People who want to know the truth go to the cinema,” says film expert Olha Berzol frankly.

She says the role was “born on the field,” shorthand for the massive protests in 2014 that ultimately ousted a pro-Russian president from power.

When crowds occupied Kiev’s main square, those who could photograph began recording everything. “So when the full-scale invasion happened, they were ready.”

Ultimately, the films they produce today are heroic tales: the enemy and the cause are clear. But it also reveals the harshest truths of this war and its true cost.

Her first husband was killed in action in 2022, and for her, films like this are a way to record the sacrifices of Ukrainians and honor their memory.

“It’s a form of justice,” she says.

“We’d really like to see other movies — maybe some comedies or some dramas,” one moviegoer, Natalia, put it on her way out of a C-movie screening.Opa and Alaska.

“Of course I don’t want to watch these films, but I have to watch them, like everyone else. Because they are our history and our present.”

(Additional reporting by Marianna Matveychuk and Anastasia Levchenko)