Two months after the start of the war in Ukraine, Antonin Peretjatko, a French filmmaker with Ukrainian roots, took a car to Lviv with his friends Fred Karali and Andrei Zhuk, who had left Ukraine but wanted to return to collect his personal belongings. They packed two 16mm Bolex cameras to document their journey. “You have to wind the camera to be able to shoot twenty seconds of film. The filming was quite specific, the protagonists’ expression had to be very precise and brief,” said the director at a debate in the Drahomíra Cinema after the screening of his new film Voyage Along the War.
He chose an analogue camera to distinguish himself from many other films capturing the Ukrainian war. “As Jean-Luc Godard said, HD is like Ingres’ paintings, whereas analogue films are more like August Renoir, more impressionistic,” he added. “After my first trip to Ukraine in April 2022, I regretted my decision when I returned to France because I could have shot longer interviews using digital camera. But when I started editing the film, I saw that I had made the right decision after all. Moreover, during the second trip to Ukraine in winter there were major power outages and thanks to the analogue camera we were not dependent on electricity,” Peretjatko answered to a question from the audience.
The film, making its international premiere at KVIFF, focuses not only on people forced to leave their homes, but also on artists. “In war, the stronger side tries to eliminate the weaker. Including its culture. It’s often only when we leave our country that we realise the importance of cultural wealth for our souls,” the director believes. Andrei Zhuk, who saw the film for the first time in Karlovy Vary, also commented on the film during the debate. “It’s not a film about me, it captures testimonies of many other people. But when I saw it, I couldn’t get it out of my head. You lose people in an unnatural way during a war, and no one will be the same after it ends.”
