The 75^th Cannes International Film Festival is over. While the festival celebrates the return to relative normalcy following a global pandemic, there is a new global threat just three hours away from the sunny beaches of the Cote d’Azur—Putin’s devastating war in Ukraine. And while most of the festival attendees were eagerly awaiting the closing ceremony that reveals the winners of the competition, the few Ukrainian filmmakers who were able to come to Cannes against all odds made the most of their time away from the war front to promote their cause and art.

Writer-director Maksym Nakonechny brought his powerful debut, Butterfly Vision to the jury and audiences of the Un Certain Regard competition from Kyiv. The film follows Lilia (codename “Butterfly), a military aerial reconnaissance expert who returns home via a prisoner exchange. The opening of the film has Lilia joyfully reuniting with her family and comrades, a scene that could have been the happy ending of a different film. Although she’s returned to the comfort of civilian life, so have the lasting ramifications of her two months in Russian captivity. It is obvious that Lilia, played by 33-year-old Rita Burkovska, is changed not only mentally but physically. The film challenges the audience with the question of how to survive as a society after the war is over.

In a television interview, director Nakonechny told the HFPA that he decided to film this particular story after editing a documentary about women fighting in the Russian-Ukrainian war, Invisible Battalion. Nakonechny was specifically troubled by one woman who said that she feared captivity more than death, and wondered what kind of things these women have experienced that were worse than dying. Together with fellow Ukrainian filmmaker Iryna Tsilyk, he developed the story and shot the film before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is interesting to see how the perception of films about the war made before this year has grown in terms of collective grief. A conflict once reserved for the eastern front has now spread into the farthest western corners of the country. Butterfly Vision went from a nightmare lived by a select few people in the eastern region to widespread reality.

The film is just one of the latest in the ever-growing national canon of Ukrainian war films, such as the documentary The Earth is Blue Like a Tangerine, which won the Best Director award at the Sundance in 2021, and Maryna Er Gorbach’s visceral Klondike, which won the same award for a feature in 2022. It is incredible how the perception of those movies changes before and after the full-scale invasion of Russia that’s already been going on for more than three months.

Although Butterfly Vision did not win an award at the Un Certain Regard competition, the exposure the festival provided was just as good a prize as any. Cannes generally has a ban on political statements and protests on its prestigious red carpet, but that didn’t stop the film’s team from unveiling a giant black banner that read “Russians Kill Ukrainians. Do you find it offensive and disturbing to talk about this genocide?” As they unveiled their banner, the team also played a recording of an air siren, the very same one that Ukrainians have become all too familiar with after a Russian bombardment.

Before the premiere screening of the film, Nakonechny got up on stage and said, “War didn’t ask the culture whether it wants to be its target or its tool. It simply takes both, being, according to Heraclitus, ‘the father of all things.’ Paradoxically, it made us feel being in control of our lives, our decisions, our positions. Understanding this, neither makes one more militaristic or aggressive. It should not frighten anyone. Moreover, awareness and certain actions that follow it, may and should become the shield for the art, dignity, and thus our global unity as conscious human beings.”

The best way to see how the average Ukrainian civilian is living during wartime is to see the documentary, Mariupolis 2, a carefully edited film comprised of footage shot by Lithuanian Mantas Kvedaravicius. It explores the daily lives of people living directly under the threat of war. While shooting the film, Kvedaravicius was captured and killed by Russian soldiers. His fiancée, Hanna Bilobrava, managed to smuggle the footage out of the country and presented the film at its premiere. The audience showed their support to Bilobrava and the rest of the film’s team in a stunning display of solidarity and humanity. Mariupolis 2 functions like a portal to the city before its devastation, showing the mundane but fulfilling lives of its residents. The documentary jury awarded the film the special jury prize award, noting its “…radical, courageous, artistic and existential statement.”

War films are expected from Ukraine nowadays, unsurprisingly so. However, Dmytro Sukholytsky-Sobchuk’s debut film, Pamfir, which premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight competition, instead chooses to tell the story of a loving family in the face of a corrupt local government in the western part of the country. Leonid, played by Oleksandr Yatsentyuk, is a father returning home to his family after a long absence due to working abroad. He inherited his nickname “Pamfir,” which means “Rock” after his grandfather. Pamfir cares deeply for his family and is ready to go miles and miles for them. He is eager to save up money to send his son to college and to build a new house. Nazar, his well-meaning son, does not want to see his father leave before Malanka, their village’s annual pagan holiday, and so burns his travel documents needed to travel across the border. Not only do the papers burn, but so does the village’s parish. To protect his teenage son, Pamfir is forced to fall back into his old ways as a cigarette smuggler to the neighboring country of Romania to be able to pay for the damages. 

The story develops through the village celebration where people sing, dance and fight wearing handmade masks and wild costumes. The concept of this carnival is related to holy sacrifice. And all those folklore elements serve not only as colorful backgrounds but also as means for understanding the metaphor of the light at the end of a tunnel. In his speech at the premiere, Sukholytsky-Sobchuk even said that all movies serve as a tunnel for spectators through which they are transformed at the end. He invited the audience to dive into the tunnel that he was able to create with his team and to see for themselves how people from the Bukovina, the director’s homeland, live and what they love.

Again, the whole story of Pamfir, who is willing to sacrifice himself for his family hits differently now, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It looks like the tunnel is longer than it seemed before. Hopefully, there is light at the end.

Meanwhile, the tunnel of the Cannes festival is over. And while most festival attendees head home to begin their next film projects, Ukrainian filmmakers’ futures are more uncertain. Some of them, such as producer Vladymyr Yatsenko (who produced multiple films in recent years, including Homeward which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section in 2019), will replace cameras with guns when they return to Ukraine. Some of them will not return home but head towards their temporary shelters in Poland or other countries.

But it is certain that for all the Ukrainian filmmakers, Cannes wasn’t just a haven on the war front, but an opportunity to share their pain and strength on one of the world’s biggest stages.