Pamfir (2023)

Direction: Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk
Country: Ukraine 

Pamfir, the feature debut by Ukrainian writer-director Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk, flirts with the aggressiveness of Guy Ritchie’s early films and the bleakness of Sergei Loznitsa’s tales of hopelessness. The film, rudimentary but not excessively violent, follows Leonid a.k.a. Pamfir (Oleksandr Yatsentyuk), a former smuggler who returns to his tiny rural village in West Ukraine - located on the border with Romania - after several months working in Poland. Although happy to stay with his family - wife Olena (Solomiya Kyrylova) and son Nazar (Stanislav Potiak) - the monolithic Leonid falls into the same traps of the past to mend his son’s imprudent actions. 

Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk paints a dark and desperate portrait of a crumbling Ukraine marked by crime lords, the loss of values, traditional folklore (Malanka holiday), and the generalized corruption of public authorities. With a heavy atmosphere, Greek stoicism, and unmerited misfortune, this is an aesthetically strong picture lit by the magnificent work of director of photography, Nikita Kuzmenko. 

Pamfir finds limited options to deal with unexpected predicaments in a contemporary tragedy that is pretty decent but harsh. In his debut, and due to the script’s nature, Yatsentyuk conveys more action than emotion. His professionalism is never in question though.

Rhino (2021)

Direction: Oleh Sentsov
Country: Ukraine 

First-time actor Serhii Filimonov fits hand-in-glove in the skin of the title character, a fearless anti-hero who is not allowed to go right when he’s been on the wrong side of the fence all his life. His true name is Vova and he never turns his back on a fight, fated to be a take-no-shit gangster who seeks out all the power he can get. From the moment he joins the underworld crime organization in his little Ukrainian town in the ‘90s, a local turf war emerges. On one hand, this gives him the opportunity to gain the respect from other thugs, but on the other, he has to deal with several dangers that monstrously loom in his life. Rhino darkens his soul, inhabits the depths of hell, and can’t even find solace at home anymore. 

This is a portrait of a disgraced figure who, softening up his inner rage over the years, articulates feelings of remorse and penitence with difficulty in a film with more heart than brains. Oleh Sentsov directs with an eye for action, but his film crams so much tawdry violence, revenge and savage behavior into its framework that it ends up trapped in its own roundabouts and unexciting narrative. Everything happens too quickly and clichéd, pointing the way to a somewhat predictable wrap-up. 

Even generating some character-driven circumstances, Rhino can’t sustain its momentum. Nonetheless, the writer-director keeps the pace moving, focused on a precocious pessimism that comes off as spoiled and shallow. Unfortunately, he never found the perfect formula to make the life of his character cinematically noteworthy.

Reflection (2022)

Direction: Valentyn Vasyanovych
Country: Ukraine

Reflection, the third feature from Ukrainian director Valentyn Vasyanovych, is a slow ride on the ugliness of war and comes slightly punctuated with traces of omens and superstition. Being a little long and directed with formal beauty, the film is subtler than the filmmaker’s previous drama, Atlantis, which also deals with dead bodies and war crimes. It’s not superior, though. Certain moments put me off and I was disappointed with the finale, yet on occasion, it manages to immerse you in a quiet miasma of trauma and reconciliation.

The exhausted Ukrainian surgeon Serhiy (Roman Lutskyi) is ambushed, captured and tortured by the Russian military. His medical qualifications save him from death as he pronounces his agonized fellow prisoners dead or alive after hours of torture. He then takes their bodies to a mobile cremation machine. This involuntary cooperation makes him a free man again under a false confession. But is he completely free after what he saw? The permanent scar inflicted by a traumatic war experience provokes an awakening of conscience that makes him want to re-approach his 12-year-old daughter, Polina (Nika Myslytska), and his ex-wife, Olha (Nadiya Levchenko). 

Vasyanovych reveals a strange appeal as a storyteller. Sometimes he doesn’t give us too much, preferring long shots with a purpose. Other times, he surprises us by fragmenting the narrative flow with offbeat occurrences that do not always work. It's a demanding sit, a film both conscientious and indulgent, hopeful and exasperating. There are no high points to be found since the film excludes any sentimentality to better bring out the complexity of feelings.

Bad Roads (2022)

Direction: Natalya Vorozhbit
Country: Ukraine 

Bad Roads consists of four disturbing episodes that take place in the dangerous roads and corners of the war-torn Donbass region in Eastern Ukraine. They barely connect, but the most attentive will find a thin, almost invisible thread bridging the stories. A tipsy school headmaster (Igor Koltovskyy) tries to cross a Russian checkpoint with no passport and a dummy Kalashnikov in the trunk; a worried grandmother (Yuliya Matrosova) tries to convince her teen granddaughter (Anna Zhurakovskaya) to return home as she keeps waiting for her missing soldier boyfriend outside at night; a captive journalist (Maryna Klimova) is taken by Russian soldiers to an abandoned spa to spend the night; and a young woman (Zoya Baranovskaya) pays a high price for having run over a hen while driving. 

This bleak film unfolds with undiminished broodiness and an overall sadness that pierces. Humiliation is the world of order here in a desperate multi-layered odyssey where madness takes over sanity. First time director Natalya Vorozhbit turns her focus to the traumatic happenings, capturing the insanity of war with brutal clarity. The acting is strong and the images pretty capable, suitably obscured to bring about the right atmosphere. 

And to think that the harshness found on these Ukrainian roads became unbearable today with this magnified, inglorious war in East Europe, is even more painful. The apprehension and heaviness in Bad Roads may put you off, but it won’t leave you indifferent.

Volcano (2019)

Direction: Roman Bondarchuk
Country: Ukraine

The first fiction feature from Ukrainian Roman Bondarchuk started as a documentary. Volcano got its roots from the real life of the director’s girlfriend’s uncle, a former head of a fish farm who lost everything and now lives tormented by the future.

In this surreal comedy drama, Bondarchuk cooperated with Alla Tyutyunnik and co-producer Dar’ya Averchenko in the script, mounting a tale where fiction and reality touch with sufficiently eventful episodes and oddities to keep us absorbed.

While working with an OSCE mission in a forgotten steppe region next to the Crimean border in South Ukraine, Lukas (Serhiy Stepansky) gets lost, also losing track of his colleagues. He’s picked up by a local young woman, Marushka (Khrystyna Deylyk), who takes him to her father, Vova (Viktor Zhdanov), a jobless man with some strange ideas for business.

The anarchy of the place is alarming, and Lukas ends up being robbed, arrested, beaten up, abandoned in a hole to die, and involved in spectacular fights with a gang of a neighbor village. He also sees a mirage of dead people in the sun, and experiences friendship and true love. Is he crazy enough to stay? 

Never overheated, the film plays like a nightmarish fairy tale that is by turns austere and affecting. While the absurd humor generates crushing awkwardness, the convincing environments promulgate a sad authenticity. And this mix functions correctly, regardless the so-so finale.

Atlantis (2021)

Direction: Valentyn Vasyanovych
Country: Ukraine

Atlantis, a product of the creative mind of writer/director/producer/editor/cinematographer Valentyn Vasyanovych, opens with a bird's-eye shot filtered with a thermography effect of a man being killed by three others and buried in a hole they previously dug. This incident happened somewhere within a delimited area in Ukraine that, in 2025, is considered unfit for humans, and dangerous due to water and soil contamination as well as multiple mines spread through former battlegrounds between Ukrainians and Soviets. 

Sergyi (Andriy Rymaruk), a veteran soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, starts to find some peace under the grey skies of that same perimeter, right after the smelting plant where he was employed closes down. Although there’s not much to look at or do there, he volunteers in a program, whose goal is to exhume the bodies of war victims. Yet, the true reason for his rehabilitation isn’t the task itself, but Katya (Liudmyla Bileka), a woman with whom he dreams to live a better life.

At a first glance, this slow-burning indie might be referred to as a contemplation of the wrecked, but the gloomy inertness that haunts and afflicts us for most of its duration becomes ultimately winning. The low dynamics give the story an opaque narrative thread that becomes clearer as the clock keeps ticking, and the film shifts gears from an intriguingly morbid desolation (with scenes involving death, suicide and destructive anger) to a warm, hopeful love story. 

With both the camera work and the atmosphere recalling the works of Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Andrei Tarkovsky, Atlantis is a rough film to sit through, but those who really pay attention to its existentialist musings will be rewarded.

The Tribe (2014)

Directed by: Miroslav Slaboshpitsky
Country: Ukraine / Netherlands

Movie Review: Cannes’ last sensation, “The Tribe”, is a praiseworthy, brutal piece of speechless cinema, a product of the mind of first-time writer-director, Miroslav Slaboshpitsky. Set in a sunless Ukrainian city, the drama follows a deaf-mute teenager who arrives at a specialized boarding school for people in the same conditions, being immediately incorporated in a ruthless gang of students dedicated to robbery and prostitution. Unsurprisingly, the latter activity has a teacher as the leader, and soon the newcomer is assigned to pimp two of the teen girls that are used to beat the truck parking lot during nighttime. He slowly gains the trust of his fellows but irredeemably falls for one of the prostitutes. When this girl realizes her pregnancy, no other option is ever considered beyond the abortion, which is done in a private house by an austere, creepy woman. This is probably the most disturbing scene of the film (disputing with the maniacal finale), where in a horrible environment and with precarious sanitary conditions, she’s tied with ropes like an animal, bravely enduring the pain inflicted on her. The young man, madly in love, starts stealing in order to pay for her time, putting himself in a perilous position. The situation reaches even bigger proportions after he realizes she’s about to be taken to Italy. As a sign language film, communication was never a problem in “The Tribe”, which was very perceptible, and even persuasive on the dramatic level. There are no words to express how brilliant was the deaf-mute cast, so genuine and powerful at all levels. Mr. Slaboshpitsky sparked confidence, filming with insistent assertiveness, and revealing a shocking realism, bestial violence, and raw sex scenes in its plenitude. Words? For what?

My Joy (2010)

Realizado por: Sergei Loznitsa
País: Ucrânia

Filme amargo e brutal sobre a completa alienação de Georgy, um camionista que parte numa viagem sem regresso, um autêntico pesadelo que acabará por fazer com que perca a moral e o juízo. Este será confrontado com os frequentes abusos de poder por parte das autoridades soviéticas, acabando por ser vítima da desolação e miséria que envolvem o seu país decadente. Tudo isto é retratado através de ladrões, ex-combatentes traumatizados, funcionários corruptos e até prostituição infantil. Não é um filme fácil de se assistir e por vezes até é de difícil leitura, mas nunca perde o sentido nem deixa de ser interessante, num retrato poderoso e crítico de uma Ucrânia em declínio.