“Hell is happening.” So says Ukrainian artist and unlikely warrior Slava Leontyev in the moving new documentary Porcelain War, as his unit heads into combat with Russian forces in the city of Bakhmut. What follows are several gut-clenching minutes of juddering battle footage. 

But that video is the exception in this remarkable film—the winner of the 2024 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for U.S. documentary, along with more than 50 prizes at other festivals—which shows three artists surviving Putin’s attacks on their home city of Kharkiv, just a few miles from the border. Even as they fight, we see them creating the art that sustains them, and in interviews, they assert that among the war’s great losses are the creative people who have perished under the Russian onslaught, as well as the creators who will never be born because of what they call, in part, a cultural genocide. 

But even amid the hell of war, the artists find a contrasting, life-affirming message.

“From the very beginning,” said Leontyev at a recent New York screening, “we understood that we would be never focused on evil, we would be never focused on destruction, we would be never focused on ruins, because all war looks the same. All destruction looks the same. Much more important to show what may be destroyed because of this war.”

Anya Stasenko admires Slava Leontyev’s latest porcelain creation, a tiny owl, in Porcelain War (2024). ©Picturehouse 2024

“Our responsibility,” he added, “as artists and filmmakers, [was to] bring hope and inspiration, even from the center of this violence and destruction.” By that measure, the film is a resounding success. 

Co-directed by Leontyev and Los Angeles filmmaker Brendan Bellomo, Porcelain War documents, over its 87 minutes, a year in the life of Leontyev, his wife and art-making partner Anya Stasenko, and painter Andrey Stefanov, who was pressed into service in his debut outing as cinematographer. 

While the film makes the realities of war very vivid indeed, it also testifies powerfully to the survival of the Ukrainian nation and its artists. “Ukraine is like porcelain,” says Leontyev in the film, “easy to break yet impossible to destroy.”

Leontyev and Stasenko create small sculptures they call “porcelain beasts,” including snails, tiny dragons, winged horses, and the like, which Stasenko paints in extremely fine detail, sometimes under a magnifying glass, with rich colors and intricate patterns.

The duo take much of their inspiration from nature, and the film opens with long, loving shots of them and their little terrier, Frodo, in the grassy fields near Kharkiv before it cuts to heartbreaking footage of the devastated city, in ashen gray punctuated by orange blasts. Those contrasts recur throughout, highlighting the savagery of war by contrasting it with moments of everyday life.

Slava Leontyev and Frodo in the field in Porcelain War. ©Picturehouse 2024.

Leontyev’s unit, dubbed Saigon, was a group of civilians including an I.T. analyst, a furniture salesperson, a dairy farmer, and a building contractor, who are all introduced in the film. In the field, they monitor the movement of Russian troops, provide safe conduct and rescue missions for the army, recover unexploded munitions and landmines, and engage in close-quarters combat. Between missions, they talk about the war and what moved them to fight.

The film relies partly on footage of battle and of refugees fleeing the war, but also sparingly introduces animated passages—for example, to indicate the initial invasion and bombing campaigns. The filmmakers decided to not emulate journalists, to not show “disgusting or shocking things,” on the principle that, as Stasenko put it, “Nothing should be pitiful.”

Slava Leontyev trains civilian soldiers in Porcelain War (2024). ©Picturehouse 2024

The filmmakers worked with Polish BluBlu Studios, which created traditional, hand-drawn animation cells, numbering over 5,000 frames. Animation is more or less de rigueuer in contemporary documentary, taking the place of static B-roll, envisioning past events that weren’t caught on film, providing visual variety, and so on. Because the imagery here comes straight from Stasenko’s work, it’s more organic and convincing than what you sometimes see.

“Animation enabled us to make the paintings evolve and change, adding a whole other layer of emotion and visual progression,” said Bellomo in press materials. “It is part of the DNA of the film, and allowed all of us to contribute something unique to our individual backgrounds.” 

Porcelain War is remarkable not only for its content but also for how it came to exist. Los Angeles-based Bellomo and his creative partner and wife Aniela Sidorska (who is a producer, writer, and editor on the film) had met Leontev and Stasenko on a different project. Sidorska, born in Communist Poland, was familiar with life under Russian oppression. 

“Eventually, Slava revealed to us that he was in the Ukrainian Special Forces,” says Bellomo. “Not only was he a soldier, but he was training other soldiers and civilians.” The concept for the film was born when Bellomo asked if they could start to shoot footage of their own experience.

Slava Leontyev, co-director of Porcelain War (2024) and former soldier in the Ukrainian special forces. ©Picturehouse 2024

“I saw that we could do something for Ukraine and for the people that are suffering from brutal aggression, that are facing genocide,” said Leontyev in press materials, adding, “But I had to find the beauty in the destruction and confront that ruined backdrop like a tiny, perhaps partially damaged figurine.” One shot shows a figurine of an owl perched in a bombed-out wall; other tender moments show Leontyev’s fellow-soldiers admiring the porcelain figurines.

Bellomo, who had taught filmmaking at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, devised a long-distance crash course in filmmaking for his Ukrainian collaborators, designing tutorials for them, with Leontyev all the while training his soldiers and executing combat missions. Sympathizers risked their very lives to smuggle filmmaking equipment into Ukraine via Poland.

“He guided and motivated us in a way that helped me gain confidence very quickly,” says Leontyev in press materials. “With a teacher like that, it’s hard to make mistakes.”

A Ukrainian Special Forces soldier in Kharkiv, Ukraine, in the film Porcelain War (2024). ©Picturehouse 2024

The film is in search of a distributor who can get it in front of wider audiences. At the New York screening, producer Paula DuPré Pesmen indicated that there had already been one screening in U.S. Congress, but that another should take place after the January 20 inauguration of Donald Trump, who has consistently expressed his admiration for Russian president Vladimir Putin and promised to end the war, without specifying how he would do so. When he debated vice president Kamala Harris in September, Trump declined to say he was committed to Ukraine defeating Russia, and has instead said the country should give up territory to Moscow.

Pro-Trump Republicans in Congress have also taken the position that Ukraine’s fight should not be America’s fight, and blocked a $61 billion military aid package for several months last year, resulting in deadly shortages of weapons and ammunition on the front lines; the legislation passed in April.

If other countries think they can shrug off this conflict, Leontyev has news for them, warning them that this is not a civil war, and that if Putin is rewarded for his current aggression, he’ll hardly be discouraged from further military ventures. 

The film, he said, “was a chance to declare: ‘We are here, we are being destroyed, we are resisting. Help us while we are still here, for you will be next.’”