A Ukrainian artist couple and their dog romp through fields and forests outside their bomb-devastated city of Kharkiv, filmed by their friend, a painter who has taken up the camera to document life, resistance and a people under siege. The couple, Slava Leontyev and Anya Stasenko, use imagery of bugs and plants as they create small porcelain figures, fashioning art out of chaos while Leontyev trains ordinary people to use automatic weapons, creating citizen soldiers for the organized resistance to the Russian invasion. And, completing the “Porcelain War” title, Andrey Stefanov follows one of the newly trained military units into battle, where they drop small bombs from drones, painted by Anya, destroying Russian tanks while protecting the Ukrainian infantry with mortars and rescue missions.
Stefanov, who shot the majority of the film that won the Sundance Film Festival’s grand jury prize for documentary, used cameras smuggled into Ukraine by an American artist friend, Brendan Bellomo, who co-directs with Slava. People are also reading..
. There’s much to unpack in the 87-minute picture. It’s message that art can be a metaphor for resistance is repeatedly hammered home, as Stasenko precisely paints the tiny figurines Leontyev creates out of the fragile, yet strong material.
But, the film shows that art can be act of resistance in itself, whether painting the drone or, intentionally, preserving Ukrainian art and culture that the Kremlin is trying to bomb and propagandi.