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‘Porcelain War’ Review: Affecting but Patchy Ukraine-Set Documentary Splits Its Interests Between Art and Combat
The delicacy of crafting ceramics and the brutality of warfare are contrasted in Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev's Sundance winner 'Porcelain War.'
Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Slava and Anya lived a bucolic life in rural Crimea, and the film often cuts sharply from gilded magic-hour footage of that idyllic recent past — rambling and foraging in the forest with their scrappy dog Frodo, diving into sun-lacquered lakes, crafting in their rustic cottage — and the cold gray light of their present-day urban existence in war-torn Kharkiv, where they moved instead of fleeing the country altogether. Leontyev presents his own subjective wartime experience with vivid sensory aplomb, the dynamically roving camera (often directed by his close friend Andrey Stefanov) accompanied by a fevered, clattering score from DakhaBrakha, a self-described “ethic chaos” band based in Kyiv. Later, Slava and Anya’s skills overlap to eerier effect when she gives a whimsical paint job to one of the bomber drones deployed by Saigon, his portentously-named military unit of scrappy volunteers: We later see it in action over pinpointed Russian foot soldiers, a colorfully striped dragonfly of death.
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