SET IN 2025, “Atlantis” depicts the grim aftermath of a war between Ukraine and Russia. Ukraine has prevailed, but at great cost. The groundwater is poisoned. Muddy landscapes are dotted with scarred buildings and rusted machinery. Workers in white bodysuits exhume corpses, enumerating details of the remains. Two shellshocked veterans of the war take turns shooting targets: the protagonist, Sergiy (Andriy Rymaruk), aims a final bullet, almost as an afterthought, square into his buddy’s protective vest, knocking him to the ground.
With “Atlantis”, Valentyn Vasyanovych turned the bleak aftershocks of war into visual poetry. Later Sergiy’s friend, a steelworker, steps off a balcony into a cauldron of molten metal; visually, the tableau is as beautiful as an Old Master painting. The film’s 108 minutes consist of just 28 shots. Most are wide. In only a few does the camera, which was operated by Mr Vasyanovych, move.
Filming took place in and near Ukraine’s eastern city of Mariupol in 2018, four years after Russia seized Crimea and began to foment a separatist war nearby. After editing a rough cut, Mr Vasyanovych deemed the film incomplete. It took six more months to devise a handful of additional scenes. One of them became the film’s emotional peak—a kiss between Sergiy and a paramedic who volunteers to identify bodies with Black Tulip, a Ukrainian organisation that does that in real life.
“Atlantis”, which cost $1.2m to make, had its premiere in Venice in 2019 and has won a series of awards at film festivals around the world. The picture delighted critics and was chosen as Ukraine’s entry to the Academy Awards (though it was not nominated). But, says Vladimir Yatsenko, co-owner of ForeFilms, one of the production companies which made the movie, sales had been weak before the current war. That has changed in the wake of Russia’s invasion: the onslaught has stoked interest in, and sympathy for, Ukraine. The country’s fierce resistance has led some to believe the military underdog might actually prevail.
This is lending the film a “prophetic” status, says Charles Bin of Best Friend Forever, a Brussels sales agent. As a result, distributors have registered their interest and “Atlantis” is now available on several streaming services, including Amazon Prime, HBO Max, iTunes and MUBI. The film will soon appear in cinemas in Japan and, on April 11th, in Italy.
Today, Messrs Vasyanovych and Yatsenko are filming war documentaries in and near Kyiv, where they live. They are prepared to fight. “We can’t just run because we don’t have any other country,” Mr Yatsenko says. He has been instructed in the use of NLAW guided missiles, an anti-tank weapon donated to Ukraine by Britain. Mr Vasyanovych carries a Kalashnikov.
Whatever the war’s outcome, “Atlantis” suggests that the scars will be deep. Mr Vasyanovych’s subsequent feature, “Reflection”, offers another such warning. That film, which had its premiere last year, bears an equally chilling message for Ukrainians at risk of subjugation by Russia: it is about torture in a secret prison run by Kremlin-backed separatists in a part of eastern Ukraine occupied since 2014.
Numerous accounts of these dungeons have surfaced in real life. Stanislav Aseyev, a Ukrainian journalist who wrote a book about his torture and imprisonment in one such institution on charges of espionage, worked as a consultant on the film. Ominously, America has recently said it has credible information that Russia has a hit list of Ukrainians “to be killed or sent to camps”. If such a list exists, Mr Yatsenko says, he and Mr Vasyanovych are probably on it.
Despite critical acclaim, sales of “Reflection” have been “difficult, to be frank”, says Barbara Van Lombeek of The PR Factory, a firm promoting the film pro bono. For a movie with graphic scenes of what Mr Vasyanovych calls “medieval” torture, perhaps that is unsurprising. But with reports of Russian atrocities pouring out of Ukraine, it, too, may prove grimly relevant. ■
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