Porcelain War

"We're not going to leave." That was sculptor Slava Leontyev's answer when American filmmaker Brendan Bellomo called him after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The two had been working on an animation project built around the porcelain figurines Slava sculpts and his partner, Anya Stasenko, paints by hand, and that reply changed everything. 'Porcelain War' is the documentary that came out of it, directed by both men and shot almost entirely by the people in it.

Slava, Anya and their friend Andrey Stefanov, a painter who puts down his brushes to pick up the camera, live through the war in and around Kharkiv with their dog, Frodo. Anya keeps painting animals on porcelain as an act of resistance. Slava, who serves in the special forces, trains civilians to use weapons and goes out on missions with Saigon, a unit made up of teachers, doctors and artists rather than career soldiers. Andrey has sent his wife and daughters away so they'll be safe.

The cameras capture a life split in two. One day it's insects, flowers and sunsets in the forest; the next it's a minefield, a gutted building or the road to the front at Bakhmut. In between, Anya's drawings come alive in animated sequences that recall the couple's peaceful years in Crimea before the 2014 annexation and dream of a Ukraine at peace.

Bellomo, who started out in visual effects and supervised them on 'Beasts of the Southern Wild', taught Slava and Andrey to shoot over video calls and sent fifteen cameras to them and the Saigon soldiers, who also filmed with body cams and drones. They gathered over 500 hours of footage. Poland's BluBlu Studios hand drew 7,000 frames to bring the figurines to life, and Ukrainian band DakhaBrakha gave the film their entire catalogue, unreleased songs included. Paula DuPré Pesmen, a producer on 'The Cove', is among its producers.

It premiered at Sundance in 2024, where it won the Grand Jury Prize for US documentary, and Picturehouse opened it in New York that November before it reached UK cinemas in December. Reviews were warmly positive, though some critics felt the art and the combat never quite balanced. Stefanov earned an American Society of Cinematographers nomination, and the film was nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, which went to 'No Other Land'.

• Documentary
• War