“We don’t only fight back with weapons; we fight back with art,” says the porcelain miniaturist Slava Leontyev, who leads a brigade of fighters in a small community in Kharkiv. The camera shows us how art and self-defense come together among artists and their neighbors. They have made the decision to defend their way of life against raids by half-hearted and demoralized Russian soldiers and the Russian ordnance that scars the green fields and mushroom-rich forests that Mother Nature had a different plan for than the one Putin’s Mother Russia presumes will prevail.
In the quietude they hold sacred, we meet the brigade members and Slava’s wife Anya Stasenko. She transforms plants and insects she culls into moulded sculptures which Slava paints with delicate brush strokes. They work outside and inside. They are parents to two willowy teenage daughters who are not with them. Slava and Anya have sent them far away for safekeeping. The four communicate by Internet, each pair buoying the other, to confirm that the painful separation is just an inconvenience to put up with that serves a higher purpose.
An artist and his middle-class technician friends as soldiers? It is probably an incongruity to the Russian yes-men who, after three years, are running into a resentful and reluctant strain of cannon fodder who have seen their countrymen perish in a needless war. The lesson Russian warmakers must absorb is the one the US learned in Vietnam and from the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion: It matters little which side is better armed; what counts is which side has the greater stake in victory.
For the Ukrainian forces, be they artists, cyber technicians, mathematicians of Kharkiv, or the factory workers who held fast in Mariupol, there is nothing left to do but fight. They have thrown together to maintain their independence from Russia. It’s their turn to ponder incongruence when they hear the Russian slander that they and their fellow fighters are reactionaries, thugs who are hoping to impose a fascist takeover. It should be clear, they say, that it is just the opposite. “We want more freedom, not less!”
Slava picks up a snail sculpture that he’s been working on, and pointing to the snail’s back, observes that the snail, like the fighter, carries his home on his back. “A refugee who leaves,” he adds, “is like a snail without a back,” and the number of refugees who have left Ukraine from families that have been separated by war—is the saddest part of the story for him. He paints red and white stripes onto a drone. You can think that it’s another piece to add to his oeuvre, until in a later scene, you see his little red and white-striped drone drop explosives on a Russian tank, obliterating it. The “art” of war carries a double meaning for the miniaturists. As a cinematographer, Leontyev is well-versed in the latest filmmaking techniques. He goes for a tight focus on his and Anya’s tiny sculptures, creating mini-windows in their stomachs, which become screens for animé stories starring anthropomorphized flora and fauna from Kharkiv.
The camera then goes immersive as the lens probes a limpid stream, crystalline concentric tidal circles reflecting sunbeams. His focus jumps up above the water to the landscape. In mere moments after this shot, a call to arms mobilizes the brigade into action. They are at the ready. Their pitch-perfect targeting sends the enemy on a hasty retreat. One of the women brigade members, who earlier complained that her hands were too small to knock down a door, now leads a perilous rescue mission into a bombed building where a comrade lies wounded. She attends to him, using the medical equipment in her backpack. An ambulance rolls up to complete the detail.
Reflecting on what has brought the brigade together to forge such an effective and heroic fighting force from a handful of neighbors from disparate backgrounds, Slava looks up from the owl he is painting and says, “These are ordinary people in an extraordinary situation.”
Toba Singer