The occupying Russian soldiers paid little attention to the elderly woman shuffling through the farmland surrounding the villages outside Kyiv, taking her goat to pasture. But she was focused closely on them. After locating their positions, she headed back home with the goat, and later called her grandson, a soldier in the Ukrainian army, to give the coordinates.
The story is one of seven episodes, based on real events from the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion but lightly fictionalised, that make up a feature film about the war in Ukraine, due out later this year. All seven of the shorts have one thing in common: they tell the story of the conflict from the perspective of animals.
Filming has been under way on the anthology War Through the Eyes of Animals since the first months of the war, when a group of Ukrainian film-makers decided that using animals to tell the story of Russia’s invasion would provide a new and unusual way to bring home the horror of war.
“Animals have no politics, but they can feel good and evil,” said Oleh Kokhan, the film’s producer, in an interview in Kyiv. “We also see this war is an ecocide, which will affect the ecology of Europe and the world.”
Most of the film was shot in and around the Ukrainian capital, which has been relatively safe since the withdrawal of Russian troops after the first weeks of the war. But the constant drone and missile attacks still made it challenging to finish it. One of the episodes was meant to feature a pet rabbit owned by the director, but the animal died of shock during an air raid a week before the filming, said Kokhan.
One of the shorts that make up the film features the Hollywood actor Sean Penn, in the role of a US sound producer who has ordered some audio of birdsong from a Ukrainian colleague just as the war is beginning. Kokhan said Penn had agreed to donate his payment for the film to charities supporting Ukraine.
Another features Oleksandr Pecherytsya, a film and theatre actor who signed up for a territorial defence unit in the first days of the war, and who came to shoot scenes during the first winter of the war dressed in his military fatigues, straight from the checkpoint he was guarding. He did not need to change to play his part as a soldier.
“It was quite weird, I was holding an unloaded prop gun for the shoot, when 15 minutes before I’d been holding a real one,” he said.
Until February 2022, his only experience with weapons had been with stage props, but he spent more than a year in the armed forces, first in the Kyiv region and then around Kharkiv.
“My acting skills proved to be very useful in the war. I tried to compartmentalise what I was seeing and tried to keep it separate from normal life. Of course, it didn’t work fully, but certainly my experience as an actor was helpful,” said Pecherytsya.
After a year of serving, he left the army to go back to acting. He said he would return to serve if Kyiv was threatened, but added that for now the cultural front is equally important. Originally from Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine, Pecherytsya grew up speaking Russian and much of his early work was on Russian films or television serials shot in Ukraine.
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“After 2014, I had a rule that I would only work on productions made in Ukraine and by Ukrainians,” he said. But even then, much of the work was filmed in Russian and then dubbed into Ukrainian, as the makers wanted to sell it in several post-Soviet markets. Now, Pecherytsya only acts in Ukrainian, and does not speak Russian in daily life either.
“I think there is now a fight for Ukrainianness as well – for Ukrainian language, theatre, cinema, for all of these things to develop and to come out of the shadow of Russianness,” he said.
Ukraine’s film industry, like everything in the country, has been affected by the war, as many people have either left the country or are serving at the frontlines. But films are still being made. Ukrainian film-makers are primarily focused on documenting the war. Intercepted, a recent documentary directed by Oksana Karpovych, combines the audio of Russian soldiers’ phone calls back home with images of the destruction they wreaked in Ukraine.
Kokhan described the film about animals as part of a “cultural front” in a bigger battle. “We are in an information war, and cinema is one of the most persuasive instruments,” he said.
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