“They’re only a few miles from the front line, and I was working in Los Angeles. We were separated by this great distance and by a language barrier,” Porcelain War director Brendan Bellomo says. “We did not speak the same language, and we were in different time zones in different cultures. They had never used a camera before.”
Bellomo, speaking with POV via Zoom, explains the collaboration with his co-director, Slava Leontyev, who was filming the war in Ukraine from Kharkiv with his wife, Anya Stasenko, and their friend and fellow artist Andrey Stefanov as cinematographer. The unusual and, no doubt, challenging circumstances lend an air of urgency to this artistic self-portrait from the front lines. Porcelain War opens in theatres this week after a healthy festival run that began with a Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at Sundance this year, although the doc had an unusually long road to distribution even with that accolade. (Picturehouse picked it up for North America with The Impact Series helping with the Canadian release.)
Besides bridging geography and language, though, Porcelain War adds a third element to the creation of this documentary: none of Slava, Anya, or Andrey is a filmmaker. Slava and Anya make porcelain sculptures—he crafts the models and she paints them—while Andrey is a painter. Bellomo, who makes his feature directorial debut with Porcelain War alongside Leontyev, says he drew upon his work teaching at NYU’s film school to show his colleagues how to tell their story.
“I wanted to create a crash course for people who were master storytellers in a different medium,” observes Bellomo. After fits and starts working with a translator over Zoom, he says he recognised their shared language for visual art could be an effective communication tool.
“We started to sketch while we were waiting for the translator, and these sketches from Slava and myself became storyboards, and those became camera diagrams and floor plans,” says Bellomo. “We would share paintings that we loved and sculptures, and all of a sudden we realized we’re totally fluent in this visual arts.”
At that point, Bellomo says he felt confident that he could teach these freshmen filmmakers how to become active tellers of their own story. Once he ensured that his colleagues in Ukraine were holding the exact same filmmaking tools in their hands as those with which he was demonstrating over Zoom, they learned quickly.
“Our cinematographer, Andrey Stefanov is an oil painter by trade,” says Bellomo. “Although he’d never used a camera, he understood composition. He understood lighting. He knew where to put his canvas. It was merely a new paintbrush for them, and they were absolutely masterful. They were so intuitive in their pursuit of beauty and of truth and their curiosity.”
To get those cameras into Ukraine, the Porcelain War team enlisted a colleague from New Jersey to bring some equipment during her humanitarian aid trips. “She took the first camera and then she started taking more and more things through,” explains Porcelain War producer Paula DuPré Pesmen (The Cove). Porcelain War, notably, features professional-calibre war footage shot by ordinary citizens tasked to become soldiers. The film outlines how the potpourri of fighters in Slava, Anya, and Andrey’s squadron Saigon are merely teachers and doctors. They’re just everyday people learning tools of two trades—war and filmmaking—while defending their homeland.
“Brendan would train them on the new pieces, and pretty soon it was drones and it was body cams, GoPros—we continued to send things through and Brendan again would teach them how to use them,” says DuPré Pesmen. “Pretty soon, the whole unit became part of the crew. Everybody started helping. They were really empowered, all of them, to tell their own story from their perspective by having these new tools.”
In order to maintain secrecy about Saigon’s placement and activities, Bellomo and DuPré Pesmen note that they kept all footage at a three-month delay for external eyes and stored encrypted material on a secure server. However, Bellomo notes that Slava and company could send footage quickly—Porcelain War doesn’t feature any anxiety-inducing Wi-Fi signal searches à la 20 Days in Mariupol—and convene the next day over Zoom to discuss the rushes.
The director says that he and producer Aniela Sidorska would cut scenes in Avid after receiving them and then offer feedback to their Ukrainian colleagues. “They’re artists; they’re curious people. They’re driven, so they would say, ‘Oh, this is amazing. Can we go back and film this?’” says Bellomo. “Not only are they in a war zone, but under all of these terrible circumstances, we started to see footage where they wanted to go somewhere and they encounter a minefield.”
But sometimes returning to pick up a shoot also means continuing the soldier’s side of the job. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is terrible. Just get out of there, be careful,’” Bellomo continues. “And then Slava says, ‘We’re going to de-mine not only so that we can film here, but so that other people in the community are safe when they go to this beautiful river.’ They would go to the river and it would inspire something that would become a part of the story in the figurines. This was very dynamic. So, despite the distance and language barrier, we were in constant communication. It was a very, very intensely collaborative process.”
“The figurines” to which Bellomo refers comprise key elements that distinguish Porcelain War as a work of true art born from the unlikeliest of circumstances. The documentary offers striking vignettes in which Slava and Anya use their porcelain figurines to illustrate the resilience of Ukraine. They place their exquisitely detailed figurines—an owl, a snail—among the rubble as an artful method to capture the unfolding tragedy without focusing on destruction.
They also film these figurines in the beauty of the Ukrainian countryside. Andrey’s painterly cinematography captures the landscape beautiful while Saigon’s smallest fighter, Frodo the dog, trots around. Frodo offers the picture perfect image of a spirit that can’t be shattered.
The figurines and their placement at the front lines illustrate the uniquely collaborative dynamic of Porcelain War. But it’s one addition among a growing body of documentaries that blur the line between participant and storyteller. Bellomo and Pesmen think it’s important to consider context and circumstance when negotiating the dynamics at play. In this case, though, the artistic perspective is the story.
“Each story asks those who tell it what form it should take, and in this particular circumstance, we were discussing things at the very beginning of the war. Slava felt that it was incredible that so many western journalists had come to Ukraine to observe what was going on and share this story with the world, and that was very vital,” says Bellomo. “And yet it was not a complete perspective. There was a perspective that was missing from within Ukraine: that of an artist. As porcelain artists as ceramicists, they create these figurines, different animal forms, but they paint on them the stories of their lives—the narratives of their past and their peaceful time in Crimea before it was annexed to Russia during the initial part of this long conflict in 2014—what they’re going through in the present, the first days of the invasion.”
Pesmen agrees, and says that she and Bellomo had considered the “traditional” approach to go and observe, but quickly found that it wasn’t right or practical. “It would’ve shifted the dynamic of the film. It’s very intimate, it’s very personal, and letting them hold the camera and really tell their own personal story was important,” she says. “Slava talks about every butterfly, every caterpillar, every flower—even the people that they were filming—they filmed it as if that could be the last of their existence, including themselves. When they go to bed at night, they don’t know if they’re going to wake up because homes are being attacked and people are dying in their beds.”
The producer adds that going in and observing the old-fashioned way would interrupt the dynamic that makes Porcelain War unique. “Slava says they don’t go away to war, and that’s in our minds here,” she notes. “War has come to their front door. It’s right outside their window. That juxtaposition of their daily life and their night life and trying to live in a war zone is a new perspective that I hadn’t seen before.”
Bellomo agrees and says that it was letting that dynamic play out—that of the reluctant soldier—that allowed the element to develop as his Ukrainian colleagues explored how to keep their artistic impulses engaged during the day-to-day duties of wartime. “It’s metaphorical. It’s deeply personal and an emotional truth of what they’re going through, including their dreams for a peaceful Ukraine that they paint and glaze onto these figurines,” he observes. “Documentary as a deeply flexible form can shift in order to include this, so we really wanted to empower them to tell this. We wanted to work together as artists, and they have a very strong sense of form, of tonality, of aesthetics.”
Atop the figurines, delicate animation by Warsaw’s BluBlu Studios evokes more facets of the Ukrainian war story. Figures atop the porcelain ornaments enact something akin to a dumbshow as Slava and Anya offer reflections in voiceover. Sometimes an animated Frodo scurries by and offers some levity.
“It’s a nonfiction story, but the war is not over. There’s no conclusion, so to speak, yet animation and the figurines allowed us to have pillars in the story,” says Bellomo. “We have an animation of their past, their peaceful time in Crimea, their present dealing with the situation in the war, and their dreams of a peaceful Ukraine. These animations allowed us, from a structural standpoint, to anchor what was otherwise a story that was progressing somewhat linearly in these different modules and chapters. It’s a complicated edit structure, so to speak, because we’re also interweaving this context and getting to know Anya and Slava.”
Porcelain War makes clear that the events with the artists and Saigon are merely a microcosm of the fuller story of ordinary Ukrainians amid the Russian invasion. Bellomo says it’s difficult for him to answer the question of how many sides to the story there are, but that Porcelain War’s entry point is the artists. That perspective, he notes, dictates the events captured for the film.
“The Russian infantry and the Russian people are in a terrible position. They’re forced into this position, and they’re in a really, really difficult, challenging spot. It’s complicated,” says Bellomo. “Our mission is to make sure that this perspective is as clear as possible, and it’s a deeply personal one, and it’s one of deep importance because they’re pacifists, they’re artists.”
Bellomo circles back to DuPré Pesmen’s earlier point about these filmmakers/soldiers being everyday people when it comes to guiding this perspective. “We talk about Ukrainian Special Forces in Slava’s unit. These are people that don’t want to fight,” he says. “They’re doctors, they’re graphic designers, they’re teachers, they’re historians. These are civilians. These are not professionals, and they’re up against professional assailants from Russia, so that is a very, very imbalanced situation.”
The Russians also don’t have Saigon’s secret weapon: Frodo. The little terrier is mightier than any missile, drone, or bullet. The dog becomes an indefatigable member of the unit as he scurries about the platoon, hopping on tanks and leading the charge. He illustrates why the porcelain mementoes matter: they’re small reminders of life worth preserving.
“Frodo is a tiny miracle. He’s so brave and he’s brave during shelling and while being in war-torn areas of Kharkiv,” says Bellomo. “He represents, I think, so many animals in Ukraine and innocent people that have no choice in this circumstance.” This innocence is something that Slava and Anya emphasize through their figurines.
“Frodo is a big part of the story and he is a big part of the animations, and their drawings and paintings. He represents a factor of their life that really matters. Paying attention to the spirit of what we can be, even in the darkest of times, is key to the way they see the world.”
