More than 900 days since Russia first launched its invasion and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine, aimed at annexing territory and erasing Ukrainian identity, the conflict rages on \u2014 but in terms of achieving his strategic objectives, President Vladimir Putin has already lost.<\/p>\n
In seeking to topple Ukraine\u2019s democratically elected government, dismantle its statehood, and assimilate any surviving civilians into Russia, the Kremlin made its war an existential conflict for Ukrainians, who\u2019ve demonstrated extraordinary resilience, passion, and unity in defending their sovereign nation. In threatening to impose its autocratic regime, Russia has succeeded only in deepening Ukrainians\u2019 determination to protect their democracy and forge a political, economic, and cultural identity outside of a post-Soviet Russian sphere of influence.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ironically, it is the folly of Putin\u2019s imperial ambition that has most effectively rallied leaders and civilians to the cause of Ukrainian nationalism and the unrelenting brutality of his assault that has most strengthened solidarity for Ukraine from Western and European powers. It speaks to the spirit of resistance still motivating Ukrainians in the present moment that, for all those who fled their homes and lived outside the country as refugees, millions of civilians defiantly chose to remain in Ukraine, fighting to defend their homeland.<\/p>\n
When he flew to Warsaw in April 2022, a little over a month after Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion, Ukrainian-American documentary filmmaker David Gutnik intended to make a film about people displaced by the conflict. After learning of artists who\u2019d stayed behind in the western city of Lviv, near Poland, his focus shifted, and he found himself crossing the border with a camera in hand.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cRule of Two Walls\u201d started shooting that month and finished production in Kyiv that November, amid blackouts caused by attacks on Ukraine\u2019s power supply and other critical infrastructure. In that early stage of the conflict, as Russian forces bombarded cities and laid waste to urban areas, the wailing of air raid sirens became so commonplace that civilians would often choose not to seek refuge in bomb shelters. If each day might be their last, they reasoned, they did not want to spend it running for cover, bracing for impact.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The title refers to this fatalistic thought process and the liminal reality that gave rise to it: to stay safe without leaving home and maintain at least two walls between oneself and the blast impact. Living in war, distinct from simply surviving it, makes such difficult-to-imagine compromises inevitable. What\u2019s extraordinary about Gutnik\u2019s film is what he captures of daily life under such conditions: how, even as bombs fall and missiles arc overhead, life goes on. How can it not?\u00a0<\/p>\n
To Lviv, even getting up in the morning is a form of resistance, and a beautiful one \u2014 which is why Gutnik, who blends narrative and documentary techniques throughout his film, chooses to open \u201cRule of Two Walls\u201d with a scene of two lovers in bed, sharing a lighthearted moment before the sirens sound. In his focus on musicians and artists who\u2019ve found a way to create amid the destruction, processing their anger and grief through making art, Gutnik\u2019s main exploration is of the continued role that Ukrainian culture plays in sustaining its society and national spirit, of the manner in which staying true to one\u2019s artistic instincts is a signifier of profound dedication to Ukrainian cultural identity; of individual expression as collective resistance.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cCulture is an action and product of a people,\u201d explains Lyana Mytsko, the director of the Lviv Municipal Arts Center, which has functioned as both a shelter and an exhibition space during the conflict.\u00a0 \u201cSo it is not possible to have a nation and not have a culture. When Putin says we have no culture, he means we have no nation.\u201d It is for this reason that Russian military forces have repeatedly targeted churches, museums, and monuments during their assault on Ukraine, aiming to erase the country\u2019s cultural heritage along with its history as an independent state, in violation of international law.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Gutnik\u2019s film shows us the Donetsk Regional Drama Theatre in Mariupol, destroyed in Russian airstrikes that killed the 600 people sheltering there, despite “\u0414\u0435\u0442\u0438,\u201d the Russian word for children, painted on the ground at its front and rear entrances, large enough for satellites to see. Diana Berg, one actress and activist who\u2019d studied there, speaks about continuing her work in Lviv, struggling to depict through her art \u201ca different Mariupol\u201d than what ruins of it still exist. For many of them, she explains, making art is a means of \u201cregaining control,\u201d of asserting the right of Ukrainians to exist in defiance of Russia\u2019s violent efforts to not only wipe them off the map but blot out their history.<\/p>\n
Another remarkable sequence, without a word of dialogue, visits Kyiv\u2019s city center, where civilians gradually surround a statue of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine\u2019s national poet, with sandbags so as to protect it from Russian missile strikes. The effect is haunting and strangely hopeful\u00a0, as if this monument is temporarily ceding ground to a more modern art installation established in its honor. This mirrors an earlier sequence where artists explain that walls of Ukrainian buildings were once detailed with interior murals before they were covered up with white plaster during the Soviet era. It\u2019s only amid the recent destruction that many such murals have been uncovered and restored, a process of literally chipping away at colonialist historiography.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
More than 900 days since Russia first launched its invasion and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine, aimed at annexing territory and erasing Ukrainian identity, the conflict rages on \u2014 but in terms of achieving his strategic objectives, President Vladimir Putin has already lost. In seeking to topple Ukraine\u2019s democratically elected government, dismantle its statehood, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[43],"class_list":["post-1496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-documentary-movies","tag-documentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1496\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}