Venice films expose horrific Ukraine war, man s brutality kuwaittimes.net - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from kuwaittimes.net Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Sign up for Sight & Soundâs Weekly Film Bulletin and more
News, reviews and archive features every Friday, and information about our latest magazine once a month.
Email
Sign up
The orange-green glow of heat camera footage reveals a couple of figures, likely soldiers given their bulky clothing and weaponry, standing around a small trench. A prostrate body is dragged in and pitched into the shallow grave, shovelfuls of dirt slung over it.
The image is so alien it takes a minute to process its real horror â the blob representing the victim is glowing orange as the black earth gradually obscures it: he is being buried alive. Ukrainian director Valentyn Vasyanovychâs remarkable Venice 2019 Horizons winner Atlantis may immediately switch to exquisitely composed, live-action images of startlingly crisp, austere devastation but his filmâs most potent motifs are all established in this eerie, alien opening: war, death, callousness, heat and dirt.
Last modified on Mon 3 May 2021 07.01 EDT
Ukrainian writer-director Valentyn Vasyanovychâs drama won the top prize in the Horizons strand at the Venice film festival in 2019: in the signature style of Slavic arthouse cinema, it mostly comprises a series of long-held, static widescreen tableaux. Each scene is about the same length, and within each long, ventilator-speed shot everything seems to carry the same weight: a man being berated by a supervisor at a steel mill and then jumping into the smelter in despair; another guy making a bathtub out of a rusted out car; a couple having sex in real time. The story is set in 2025, âa year after the end of the warâ â in other words the one with Russia in eastern Ukraine thatâs been rumbling away for years now. But instead of being numbingly dreary and depressing, given the economically depressed, horrifically polluted and landmine-strewn region, Atlantis is strangely upbeat, oddly hopeful even.