‘Butterfly Vision’ Director: ‘We Are Fighting for Our Identity and Our Freedom’

Jessica Kiang It’s possible that the very first casualty of war is not truth, but nuance. Since Maksym Nakonechnyi’s grimly disturbing “Butterfly Vision” was conceived and shot, the protracted Donbas conflict during which it is set has flared into all-out war following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentParis-based sales company Charades has closed a raft of deals on “Forever Young,” Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s film which competed at Cannes and earned a warm critical welcome. “Forever Young” opens at the end of the 1980s in Paris and follows a young troupe of comedians who have just have been admitted to Les Amandiers, the prestigious theater school headed by Patrice Chéreau. Bruni Tedeschi wrote the script alongside Agnès De Sacy and regular collaborator Noémie Lvovsky.

Though shot and set prior to the Russian invasion, by dint of being a Ukrainian picture detailing the aftermath of a woman soldier’s assault in the Donbas, “Butterfly Vision” lays claim to uniquely wretched timeliness at this year’s Cannes. What is an impressive if formally flawed first film from Maksym Nakonechnyi earns some emotional weight vis-a-vis present events: the Ukrainian flags of blue and white, flown with unsparing pride across Nakonechnyi’s images, bear the immediate frisson of beleaguered resistance, and that women Stateside presently face unprecedented threats to their bodily autonomy only compounds the miserable resonance.

SPOILER ALERT – This story contains Top Gun: Maverick plot points: In the opening moments of Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise’s Capt. Pete Mitchell takes an an experimental hypersonic plane called “The Darkstar” on an unauthorized test run. Those who’ve seen the trailer — or the movie, at this point — will recall a low-flying triangular aircraft blowing past a lonely guard post on the desert floor. In a half-second, the flyby literally blows the roof off the shack.

The major prize-winners at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival have yet to be announced, but there is no question about which film is the most important. “Butterfly Vision” doesn’t just have the distinction of being one of the two Ukrainian productions on display (the other being Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s “Pamfir”), it also tells a story about the effects of warfare both on Ukraine’s soldiers and the citizens who have waited for them back home. It is almost incredible that Maksym Nakonechnyi was able to finish “Butterfly Vision” and to bring it to Cannes, where he made a touching speech about the risk of Ukrainian culture being extinguished.

Arguably the most timely film in Cannes this year, Butterfly Vision will also likely remain one of the least seen, in that it exists overwhelmingly as a marker of a very specific time and place rather than as anything many people might actually choose to watch. Presented in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, this somber and sobering document about Ukraine appears to mix verité-style dramatized scenes with television and other visual material that is never less than tremendously grim. How and by whom it might be shown in the territories where viewers would most appreciate it is unclear; depressing hardly begins to describe it.

Roger Moore was 'petrified' drunk Hollywood star would drop a babyLink'Don't hit him, Sean!' James Bond star was 'begged' not to attack starLinkBoyle added: "But the passageway to it (Bond's death) was obviously very different. "The director duly made a high-profile exit, to be replaced by Cary Fukunaga. It also affected his creative team and some of the actors who had been hired specifically for his plot and Russia-based finale and who were subsequently let go.

IndieWire. “I had to say, ‘F— the war, I hate you [Russian president Vladimir Putin], bye.’ You can’t be silent about this war.”Serebrennikov himself had been in hot water with Russian authorities back in 2017, when he was convicted of embezzlement through his theater company and banned from leaving the country — a decision which outraged human rights groups who denounced the charge as falsified.

previously asked U.S. President Biden specifically not to sanction Abramovich and that the oligarch had worked to help Ukraine because of his ties to the film industry.Serebrennikov also more broadly advocated against the outright banning of Russian culture as a way to protest the war.

Tchaikovsky’s Wife filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov, a Russian dissident was grilled, by the global press at Cannes over the pic being bankrolled by oligarch financing in particular Roman Abramovich, as well as the notion of the world’s boycott against Russia.

When she was 23, Sonia Friedman was—to use her expression—thrown into a rehearsal room with Harold Pinter at London’s National Theatre. She was his deputy stage manager during production for the premiere of his one-act play Mountain Language starring theatrical royalty Michael Gambon and Eileen Atkins.

CANNES, France -- The last two times the Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov had films playing at the Cannes Film Festival, he couldn't attend. He was under a travel ban in Russia as part of a conviction for fraud in what was widely protested as unwarranted repression of the arts in Russia.

EXCLUSIVE: Vision Films’ CEO and Managing Director Lise Romanoff has closed a deal with Andrei Bocharnikov of Ukraine’s Festivals Cinema to theatrically release six films in the region—the goal being to provide a little respite, distraction and hope for those in the country who are struggling.

EXCLUSIVE: Hulu’s WeWork director Jed Rothstein is forging landmark Sky documentary Once Upon a Time in Londongrad, exploring 14 mysterious deaths in the UK with alleged connections to Russia over two decades.

Antonio Ferme editorA hero’s a hero, but everyone loves a great villain.In the case of the upcoming fourth season of “Stranger Things,” fans will be introduced to Vecna — a ghoulish, powerful lich that slithers out of the Upside Down to wreak havoc on Hawkins.“Vecna makes a Demogorgon look cuddly,” executive producer and director Shawn Levy told Variety on Saturday night at the worldwide premiere of “Stranger Things 4” in Brooklyn, N.Y.David Harbour, who stars as Hawkins police chief Jim Hopper, teased how Vecna embodies a new horror element that “Stranger Things” viewers haven’t seen before.“Vecna is a psychological horror that I don’t think we’ve really seen,” Harbour told Variety. “The Upside Down has been this wild west world where there are creatures running around, there’s violence, but we’ve never seen something as calculatedly psychologically evil as this.