‘Butterfly Vision’ Film Review: Ukrainian Post-War Drama Is Horrifically Timely

Naman Ramachandran Ahead of World Refugee Day on June 20, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency has released “Uprooted,” a powerful short film featuring and made by Ukrainian refugees now living in Germany. The film shows loud noises – a door slamming, the sirens of an ambulance, the bangs of a firework display – and how they can trigger terrifying memories of war.

Charlie Amter As the war in Ukraine rages on, recently marking a grim 100-day milestone, some of the country’s music stars are banding together to raise funds abroad in an effort to aid their countrymen, and women, still fighting in the east of the now war-torn nation.Ivan Dorn, one of Ukraine’s most eclectic and best-known music names, just finished a string of European tour dates and he now will be joined by Ukrainian artists The Hardkiss, ONUKA, and Artem Pivovarov in a small American “Stand Up For Ukraine” tour this summer. The trek is set to begin in Miami later this month, with shows to follow next month in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle.For Dorn, the gigs are a chance to play for Ukrainian fans currently living in the United States, as well as for liberal Russian expatriates and curious Americans who are sympathetic to Ukraine’s current predicament.

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.

The Ukrainian winners of the Eurovision Song Contest have sold their trophy to raise almost $1M for the war effort.

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.

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.

Marta Balaga When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, director Maksym Nakonechnyi – whose debut feature “Butterfly Vision” world premiered in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard – was developing his next film – a comedy about flat-Earth conspiracy under the working title “The Earth Is Flat – I Flew Around It and Saw It.” But he is putting it on the backburner now, he tells Variety, because “this war has already changed everything.”“I wanted to make something that wouldn’t be directly influenced by the war, but then I understood it would be anyway. When we studied Ukrainian literature back at school, we used to complain about all these depressing, tragic stories.

Cannes Film Festival.Members of the production team for “Butterly Vision,” by Ukrainian director Maksym Nakonechni, protested the ongoing war in Ukraine while on the red carpet Wednesday.In front of Salle Debussy, the second-largest theater in Cannes, the team — including producers Darya Bassel and Yelizaveta Smit, plus actress Rita Burkovska — held a banner that read, “Russians kill Ukrainians. Do you find it offensive or disturbing to talk about this genocide?”The sirens heard on the red carpet stairs were meant to symbolize air raids in Ukraine, while the protestors held signs that read “sensitive content” over their faces.Not only were they demonstrating the ongoing devastation in Ukraine, but they were also attempting to show the extent of Russian censorship.The film “Butterfly Vision” explores a similar idea, albeit in a fictional world.

Three Thousand Years of Longing” at the Cannes Festival on Friday.Wearing only panties drenched with blood-red paint, the screaming woman had the Ukrainian flag sprayed across her chest with the words “Stop raping us.” The word “scum” was also written on her lower back. Video posted to Twitter shows security personnel covering up the woman and escorting her off the carpet.

Marta Balaga Butterfly Vision (completed) Director: Maksym Nakonechnyi Producers: Darya Bassel, Yelizaveta Smith Production: Tabor Productions, 4 Film, Masterfilm, Sisyfos Sales: Wild Bunch Lilia, held as a prisoner of war for months, finally returns home. But she is struggling to resume her life as a soldier and wife, while discovering she is pregnant.Chrysanthemum Day Director: Simon Mozgovyi Producers: Alex Chepiga, Artem Koliubaiev Production: Mainstream Pictures Young doctor encounters an old woman, known as a healer, who mysteriously survives a nuclear explosion.

Returning to Cannes a year after his feverish drama “Petrov’s Flu” hit the Croisette, Kirill Serebrennikov can finally attend the festival in person after recently being free from years of house arrest. Debuting in competition, his latest offering, “Tchaikovsky’s Wife,” is a slow-burn historical drama that never manages to escape from being a bore despite its seemingly intriguing premise.

wildly entertaining rock ‘n’ roll fantasia “Leto.”The two films both show that Serebrennikov has strong ideas about how to use music, but otherwise they’re worlds apart. “Tchaikovsky’s Wife” begins with Miliukova (Alyona Mikhaylova) dressed in widow’s black and trying to choose the right words for her funeral wreath; but when she arrives in the room where her husband’s corpse is laid out, Tchaikovsky (Odin Biron, full of quiet Peter Sarsgaard smarm) rouses himself, stands up and asks, “Why is the wife here? Who invited her?”The scene is enough to tell you that this will be Miliukova’s story, and that it won’t be a straight period piece, even though it re-creates 1893 St.

Z began to be used as a symbol of support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The film is now called “Coupez!” in France.A remake of the 2017 Japanese horror-comedy “One Cut of the Dead,” “Final Cut” is silly and excessive and completely over-the-top, but it also brings out the lightness and deftness of Hazanavicus’ touch with comedy; the director somehow manages to fling body parts and bodily excretions at the audience for almost two hours, and yet you leave feeling as if you’ve seen a feel-good movie.Like the original Japanese film, “Final Cut” takes place in three parts.

TURIN, Italy -- Ukrainian band Kalush Orchestra won the Eurovision Song Contest, a clear show of popular support for the group's war-ravaged nation that went beyond music.The band and its song “Stefania” beat 24 other performers early Sunday in the grand final of the competition. The public vote from home, via text message or the Eurovision app, proved decisive, lifting them above British TikTok star Sam Ryder, who led after the national juries in 40 countries cast their votes.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy welcomed the victory, Ukraine's third since its 2003 Eurovision debut.

Christopher Vourlias As the war in Ukraine approaches a grim, three-month mile marker, and the Russian military continues its relentless onslaught, the harsh crackdown on domestic opposition by the Putin regime has left a beleaguered film industry pondering its next steps. Many Russian filmmakers fear they’ll have no choice but to toe the party line, or to flee a country that is increasingly being shut out of the international community.Two-time Oscar nominee Alexander Rodnyansky (“Leviathan,” “Loveless”), the Kyiv-born producer who has called Russia home for nearly three decades, left Moscow on March 1 after being tipped off that his opposition to the war had landed him in the government’s crosshairs.