A Simple Soldier Of The Army Of Filmmakers
The Odesa International Film Festival took place in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine — for obvious reasons. The city by the Black Sea is less protected from Russian military strikes. Yet Kyiv and its residents also live under constant threat. This is a war without a front line and without a rear…
Under such conditions, the role of the film camera as an instrument for creating a new audiovisual philosophy has become especially visible. It is precisely the peculiarities of this creative process that have determined the success of Ukrainian filmmakers — first and foremost, documentarians — whose works were included in the festival program.
Audience engagement was perhaps the most striking feature of this Odesa–Kyiv festival (for that is what, in essence, it was). It may sound almost fantastic, but the attention to Ukrainian films was several times greater than to foreign productions. At most screenings of Ukrainian films, the halls were filled to capacity. Then you would walk into the next session — a foreign film — and only a third of the seats were occupied, at best…
What does this “dream” mean? At the festival’s closing ceremony, its director Anna Machukh commented: this doesn’t mean that Ukrainians make better films than Americans or Europeans — but it does mean that what Ukrainian filmmakers speak about on screen is far closer to the hearts of our audiences.
I served on the FIPRESCI jury — that is, the critics’ jury — together with my younger colleagues, members of the Ukrainian Critics Association, Dmytro Sydorenko and Ihor Kromf. Our task was to select the best film in the National Competition, which consisted of eight Ukrainian documentaries (all based on material from the ongoing Russian–Ukrainian war). Our decision was unanimous: the award went to A Simple Soldier by Artem Ryzhykov and Latin American co-director Juan Camilo Cruz.
What made the film so impressive? Its absolute, unreserved personal openness — an openness directed toward us, the viewers. The protagonist of the film is Ryzhykov himself. He is a cinematographer by training, and, one might say, a cinematographer since childhood. His father filmed that childhood on a video camera, and later the son continued the family chronicle — fragments of which are included in the film.
A Simple Soldier unfolds, essentially, as a story about family — its values and meanings. Among them is one that, I think, shaped Ryzhykov as a filmmaker: the impulse to look attentively and respectfully at oneself and at everyone around. Those “others” thereby come into intimate proximity, becoming close kin. What is often called brotherhood-in-arms or comradeship at the front is, in fact, a transformative creation of new kinship formations — bonds that become the very foundation of survival amid the inhuman, infernal realities of war.
Among those kin-like figures are Artem’s comrade Serhii and his wife Marta, a medic. After the awards ceremony, I spoke briefly with Ryzhykov. Suddenly he said: “This didn’t make it into the film, but after Serhii was killed, it took us three more days to reach our own lines. I was dragging his body with me — leaving him out there in the steppe was simply impossible…”
This, in essence, is the diary of a man at war — a man who perceives himself above all through the eye, the gaze, enriched and intensified by the possibilities of a modern video camera. A loving eye — and a completely candid one. The filmmaker does not hide that, as a soldier, he was sometimes met with irritation by regular military personnel: he lacked their soldierly discipline and focus; he was, in a way, a folkloric warrior, too free-spirited. Hence the title — A Simple Soldier.
Together with Artem, his commander Oleksii came onstage to accept the award. The director said that if not for Oleksii, he would have died long ago in that war. That is what family means here — a family in which time and space, twisted and frozen by hellish experiences, are warmed by intimate, soulful heat. Salvific heat, one might say.
There is a tradition here — one that goes back to the legendary film Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatom / Людина з кіноапаратом, 1929) by Dziga Vertov, shot in Ukraine. It too employs a diaristic mode of capturing time and space; it too builds its visual rhythm on the author’s fascination (Vertov’s, and his brother, cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman’s) with everything that fills the space of urban life. There is no division between the great and the small — all of it is life, the life of a single human family. The same holds true for Ryzhykov and his co-director Juan Camilo Cruz.
The films that received special jury diplomas — Dad’s Lullaby (Tatova kolyskova / Татова колискова, 2024) by Lesia Diak and The Music of Being (Muzyka buttia / Музика буття, 2025) by Hennadii Chernomashyntsev — also explore family values and their dramatic charisma (that is, grace, a gift). In Dad’s Lullaby, we see the life of a war veteran struggling to adapt to peaceful reality — a reality he ultimately cannot fit into. Attention to the dramatic transformations of human psychology, to the very mentality of a person in wartime, runs through many of the festival’s works.
In The Music of Being, the filmmakers observe the patient, daily labor of the soul as it creates new human communities — and new music for those communities. The film’s protagonists are ordinary residents of a small town who live by deep emotions, attuned to the melodies and rhythms of life. The authors harmoniously combine personal stories into a kind of collective self-portrait.
Another example: in The Interception Game (Hra na perehoplennia / Гра на перехоплення, 2025) by Volodymyr Mula, we see the story of the Mykhailenko brothers — Serhii, who is at war, and Mykola, a football player on Ukraine’s Olympic team. Their bond is invisible but indispensable for a full, living existence.
In the out-of-competition film Children in the Fire (2025, Ukraine, USA, Czech Republic) by Yevgeny Afineevsky, we see a collective portrait of eight children who manage to escape Russian captivity — thanks to their extraordinary optimism, strength of spirit, and purposeful action. Their story explains much about the current confrontation between Ukraine and Russia.
War tears apart communication, reduces homes, factories, trains, and planes — the entire surrounding world — to ashes. How can one resist this? How can a defenseless, ordinary person — a soldier or a civilian — endure? In just this way: by drawing closer together, by fusing into new bodily and spiritual communities.
I believe it is precisely this quality — this deep sense of human togetherness — that explains the extraordinary attention and warmth with which audiences embraced the authors of Ukrainian films.
Sergiy Trymbach
©FIPRESCI 2025