Documentary: Ukrainian artists at war

[cbabe]

https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/aug/21/rule-of-two-walls-documentary-ukraine-artists

‘A war of who gets to write history’: the artists resisting in Ukraine
Film-maker David Gutnik lasers in on the artists pushing back against Russian aggression for an inspiring yet harrowing new documentary

Radheyan Simonpillai
Wed 21 Aug 2024 03.17 EDT

Kyiv was supposed to fall in three days. That’s what talking heads and pundits in media were saying, rather dismissively, before the February 2022 Russian invasion on Ukraine. They suggested the fight would be swift and decisive but instead the Ukrainian resistance persisted. Never mind, three days. The war is now pushing towards three years.

“What is this nation?” asks David Gutnik, a Brooklyn-born film-maker of Ukrainian descent. “What is this people? What is this identity?”

He’s posing rhetorical questions prompted by the war and describing the surprise when a country and its people, who were so quickly dismissed, held its ground. If the world believed that Ukraine would fall so soon, it’s probably because they had no idea who the Ukrainian people are. Gutnik’s profoundly resonant documentary, Rule of Two Walls, is here to remedy that.

The film is about Ukrainians on the frontlines; not the soldiers, mind you, but the artists who are standing firm on their homeland against the ash and rubble. They are painters and singers, hosting exhibits and shows, despite the constant gunfire and shelling that inevitably becomes part of the art. They’re fighting to create and protect culture, and by extension their Ukrainian identity, as a response to Vladimir Putin’s repeated insistence that they have none.

… more … trailer at link…