Porcelain WarAn Interview with Co-directors Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev Gary M. Kramer January 2025 Interviews Issue 112 Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev The timely and topical documentary, Porcelain War, chronicles the lives of a trio of artists in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Codirected by Brendan Bellomo and one of the subjects, Slava Leontyev, the film won the 2024 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival among other awards. As an opening title card informs viewers, “Nearly all of the footage you are about to watch was shot by the subjects in this film,” Porcelain War then introduces these individuals, the aforementioned Slava, his partner, Anya Stasenko, and his best friend, Andrey Stefanov, who are grappling with life as war rages around them. There are incredible drone shots of the bombed-out city, but also bucolic images of the subjects communing with nature. The question posed here is: What is the place of an artist during wartime when culture is being destroyed? Bellomo and Leontyev respond by showing Anya painting porcelain animal figures, like snails, and talking about her inability to create art after the Russians invaded Crimea. She now paints as a form of resistance. Meanwhile, Andrey, a painter who acts as the cinematographer for the film, has separated from his family – he sent his wife and daughters away for safety – and stayed to help fight. Porcelain War takes viewers on the ground as Slava trains citizens to use weapons and become soldiers, or follows Saigon, a military unit that goes to fight the Russians in Bakhmut and attends to wounded infantry. The film contrasts these intense scenes with animated sequences featuring Anya’s porcelain artwork. Porcelain War The effect creates a balance between the horrors of war and the simple pleasures in life, letting audiences understand how the actions taken during wartime are a way to ensure life continues. Bellomo and Leontyav spoke with Senses of Cinema about making Porcelain War. – G.K. First, Slava, I am sorry you are living under such horrific circumstances, but I am glad you made this film to show life during wartime. Brendan, how did you come to make this documentary? BB: I can address this by talking about how we first all connected. One of our producers, Aniela Sidorska, grew up under Russian oppression in Communist Poland. Aniela was a political refugee and became disconnected with her home and culture when her parents escaped to the United States. They tried to maintain this connection to their culture through music, and art, and cinema. About eight years ago, she discovered Anya and Slava’s figurines and was deeply moved by them because they reminded her of home. She showed them to me, and I was blown away. I had never seen anything like this before. I thought, how can something so small have such huge stories on them. Four of us began work on an animation project, and then Russia invaded Ukraine. I called Slava and Anya, and asked them, “Are you OK?” and “When are you leaving?” and Slava said, “We’re not going to leave. We are going to stay and keep making our work.” And I asked, “Why? What are you doing during the day?” And he told me for the first time that he was in the Ukrainian Special Forces training civilians to defend themselves. We thought this form of resistance and continuing to create art was absolutely incredible. Slava felt that the important news coverage was not the full story but [told] from the outside, from the West. We wanted to empower Slava and Anya and Andrey, the cinematographer, to tell this story in their own words. We decided to ship a camera into the Ukraine. But you cannot FedEx something into a war zone. It’s impossible. We discovered an amazing group of volunteers, and a makeup artist in New Jersey was moving 50 bags of medical supplies and military aid [to Ukraine] and she said she would carry a camera for us. At the same time, we had a problem. We were separated by 6,000 miles; we did not speak the same language, and there were two different time zones and cultures. Everything was working against us. I asked Anya how she was feeling in the first days of the war. She said, “We are so alone, we feel like we’re on the moon right now.” This phrase reminded me of the Apollo 13 mission and the astronauts who were stranded in this failing space craft. But in Houston they had duplicates of all the equipment they had in space. We had the same lens, camera, and microphone we sent to Ukraine in Los Angeles. We spoke on Zoom through an interpreter and created an almost impromptu film school so that Slava and Andrey could transform their instincts as master visual storytellers into cinema. This is how we began to work. Porcelain War It is impressive that Andrey was able to shoot so much footage, capturing the rubble of the city as well as the bombing and warfare that is taking place. Can you talk about the content and shaping the narrative? There are bucolic scenes juxtaposed with harsh reality. There are marvellous drone shots. But there is a sense of awe as well as danger. I liked that you walked that tightrope. SL: When we started to film, I was in the Ukrainian Army. I was not free in my decision. I was able to work on Porcelain War only because my unit and commanders completely supported us. When I picked up a camera, someone picked up a rifle in my place. I felt a huge responsibility to do my best. Andrey also felt this responsibility as a civilian, and connected with our volunteer Army. We decided we must bring hope and inspiration to audiences because people are afraid to watch a war movie because war is horrible and disgusting, and nobody wants to be upset. But our movie is about regular civilian people who can defend their independence, and who can develop culture and preserve humanity in the face of evil and aggression, even in the darkest of times. We never focused on war or destruction. Because all war and destruction look the same. News footage gets old quickly, but beauty never does. We focused on beauty and good things. Our nature and our culture is the main target of this aggression, and the beauty of my friends who now defend their identity, free choice, how they think and create families. It is familiar to us as artists to look around and find something beautiful and interesting. We looked around attentively in war – a time when everything is fragile. We filmed every flower or building as if it was their last day of their existence. BB: From a structural standpoint, we received this footage, and one roll of shots would have the most inspiring and beautiful macro shots of nature and insects and sunsets, and then the next day Slava would encounter a minefield, and he would be demining it. And the next there would be destruction, and the next was military training or a mission. There was no effort in the edit to create any sort of contrast, it was more a representation of this deep imbalance in their life that they were trying to restore at every turn. Slava and Anya talk about this concept that it is easy to make people feel afraid, but it is not possible to stop them from living. There is a drive to continue creating and honouring and taking these impressions of how amazing life is and that it can continue. In the edit, we follow the course of their lives in 2022 and 2023. We sent 15 cameras between Slava and Andrey, and the members of Saigon who have body cameras and drones. They captured over 500 hours of footage, and we worked in deep collaboration. At first, Slava and I began to sketch, and those [sketches] became storyboards, and those became diagrams and ideas for shots. We looked at paintings, or sculptures, or films that we loved, and in this way, we were completely fluent in this universal language of visual arts. The directorial collaboration was very transparent. We were very close despite this distance. We would look at dailies and cuts together to empower Slava and Andrey to sculpt this world. It was an unexpected collaboration. Andrey was a storyteller. Even what he filmed on his first day is in the final version of the film. Porcelain War SL: Anya and I did not speak any English at that time, but it was easy to understand Brandan’s explanation. He inspired us on every zoom meeting. We really had the same language of art. You describe yourselves as “ordinary people in an extraordinary situation.” And Slava, you make a very powerful statement when you say, “What I am living is absolutely not my life.” The film asks viewers to decide what they would do if faced with the same situation. I admire the Saigon team, but I don’t know that I could train to be a soldier. What informed your decision to stay and fight? SL: None of my friends had been in the army before. They all are regular civilian people, peaceful people who are completely successful in civilian life. My commander is a history professor at a local university. For us, it was so clear after the annexation of Crimea, a big war would come, and we understood from the beginning the kind of war this was. My commander looked at the war in Afghanistan and the Chechnyan war. He understood what was coming and started our preparation for this situation in future. We all are not so young and healthy, but we all are able to convert our civilian skills for something useful in this situation. I can teach people how to use a weapon because it was necessary. Thousands of civilians who never used a weapon before came to our army and picked up an AK-47 and knew how dangerous these firearms are – especially those people who never knew how to use it. I asked the unit of our army if they need an instructor for defence weapons. Everyone felt a responsibility in the face of history. It’s not about Ukraine and Ukrainians only. It’s about all of us because evil exists, and it is moving to destroy our world. Resistance is possible, and that is the main message of our movie. Regular people are ready to defend democracy. Porcelain War The film also raises questions about “the virtues and flaws of patriotism,” and protecting a way of life where free will and freedom may be limited. Can you talk more about these ideas? SL: No one civilian wants to come to the army and be under the orders and rules. We are artists. We never have a top manager over us. We decided there is no other way to do our best in this situation. BB: One of the layers that Slava talks about in the film is this notion that as peaceful people, they don’t have a choice. They want to maintain their freedom to be able to think and create and live their lives, but because that is under threat, they don’t have this choice. The only thing they feel they can do is sacrifice that freedom and be in this civilian army to defend that freedom. To ensure they can live their lives in the future, maintain their democracy and protect their culture, they are making this sacrifice, and reducing their freedom. There is a paradox in that, and it is tragic and heartbreaking to watch. The members of Slava’s unit are graphic designers, and dairy farmer, and home contractors, and IT professionals. They are not military people. Another line in the film says, “The stories we tell through art are also our resistance. This is how we avoid erasure.” What observations do you have about the place of an artist in warfare? SL: We have no choice to fight or not to fight because the war is right outside our door. We have no to choice create or not create because our identity is the main target of this aggression. Since the start of this war, our museums and universities were destroyed and so many of our artists were killed. Parents of our future artists and teachers were killed. This future of our culture is really damaged. We cannot fix anything. No one can bring these people back to life. It is our responsibility to rebuild the future of our culture, and we must continue our art and that is why we filmed this movie. BB: They are creating figurines which are immortalising the stories of their lives, their peaceful past in Crimea, before the war, the first days of the invasion, and their dreams for a peaceful future. They are recording that process in the film; they are bearing witness to their artistic process and to the lives of their friends and everything they are going through. That act in and of itself is a type of resistance. It is only possible because someone picked up Slava’s weapon and took his place so he could tell this story. Porcelain War Anya’s images remind us of happier, peaceful times. What inspired you to animate her artwork? BB: When you look deeply at Anya’s work, it is filled with life. The natural inclination when I saw this work is that this is meant to move. Animation is the perfect extension of Anya and Slava’s work. Her paintings are filled with designs but with time and emotions and stories and characters. There is such a rich world there we wanted audiences to step into this world without leaving Ukraine. We knew in the film that we would not go into some other animated world; it would come to life on the porcelain of the figure itself while it remained in a pile in the rubble, or their workshop, or in the beautiful forest. These two things came together because we collaborated with BluBlu studios in Poland. They felt a deep kinship with Ukraine and worked for a year in her style. They created by hand, 7,000 individually drawn frames, and that allowed these figurines to move. The on-the-ground scenes in the Bakhmut skirmish are fascinating as are the scenes of bombs being dropped. Can you talk about filming and including those episodes? BB: We spoke with Slava’s unit, and they felt if they could share what they were going through when they wake up in the morning, maybe somebody else wouldn’t have to be in their shoes in the future. They wanted to bring cameras into combat. We sent body cams, and drones and they learned to use them. During an active mission they would go down in a bunker, we would video chat and discuss how to film – this is a closeup, this a wide shot, this is what happens when the camera is moving. As people who had trained themselves to fight, they were transferring this drive to educate themselves and learn to be camera operators. Their bravery, risking lives in these missions and capturing that was absolutely remarkable. We were fortunate to receive an enormous amount of footage that recoded what they were going through from simultaneous perspectives, from the ground and air and we safeguarded this info because it was very sensitive. We used an encrypted pipeline and firewalled servers in secure facilities. We worked with homeland security and military advisors to safeguard the info and identities, but also fact checkers and investigative journalists to make sure what was captured was absolutely true to maintain this real authenticity to this vital and different perspective to what people haven’t seen of this war in Ukraine. Porcelain War I was very taken with the score by DakhaBrakha, which is both driving and ethereal; it captures the urgency as well as the beauty of what we are seeing. Can you discuss this collaboration? BB: I called Slava up early on in the process and asked if there was music that he loved. Slava said there is something we love, and Andrey listens to this band while he paints, and it’s DakhaBrakha. And he played this song that we open the film with, and I was transported into Ukraine. It wasn’t that it was culturally relevant, or sonically relevant, or folklorically driven. Even within the music, the members of the band are creating these vocalisations of different animals. It is very akin to Anya and Slava’s work. It contains so many different creatures of the flora and fauna of Ukraine. There was a synthesis there, so we began to cut rough edits to this band. I went to producers and said, “This is incredible, but maybe we should reach out to them to see if we can use it,” and the band was so moved by what Anya and Slava and Andrey were doing, they said, “Please use our whole library of work, even the unreleased music.” It became the heartbeat of the film, and an integral part of the story. It was not added in. It influenced and inspired the rhythm of this film from day one. Your film puts a human face on civilian fighters. I appreciate the scene where land mines are in the forest, but you go anyway. How do you think Porcelain War, with its traumas and resilience can change things? BB: We are grateful to hear from Ukrainian audiences that we show the film to that it’s more hopeful than traumatic. We’ve heard from more than one person that it is the most representative portrayal of what people are feeling. There are two layers to this. There is this deep resilience that even in the middle of a warzone, creativity is possible, and it can be restorative. Not only to create something new and contribute to this culture targeted by genocidal aggression and invasion, but also to affirm to Anya and Slava themselves that it is possible to continue living, and that there is hope that exists no matter what the circumstance is. The second facet of it is that this story is being told through their eyes and in this voice. It is this brave act of journalistic courage that is truly personal, and that emotional truth matters. That I can make something that people can utilise to understand this conflict from another perspective. It takes all different types of storytelling to understand the amazing beauty of people in the world and what is happening around them.
