‘Butterfly Vision’ Review: A Harrowing Ukrainian War Drama Arrives With Troubling Timing

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticAn intense portrait of personal obsession — à la “Black Swan” — set at the time of 2013’s Maidan Uprising, “Olga” anticipates so much of the current situation in Ukraine. Elie Grappe’s prescient debut begins and ends in a country whose people united against corruption, successfully ousting Russian-friendly president Viktor Yanukovych, though the story takes place mostly in Switzerland (last year, the politically charged drama was that country’s submission to the Oscar international feature category).

Marta Balaga Ukraine’s film-TV industry is putting words into action through “Ukrainian Content. Global Cooperation,” a joint initiative kick-started by key local media companies (https://www.facebook.com/ukrainiancontent.globalcooperation) as well as the Ukraine Content Club, a newly established worldwide community and fund that aims to sustain the industry impacted by Russian invasion.The latter, still in an early development stage and mentioned during the Stand with the Ukrainian Media Industry panel at Toledo’s Conecta Fiction, will help finance development and production of scripted drama, animation and factual content.An independent board will allocate the money to productions based on pre-defined selection criteria.

This is so heartbreaking.

Jessica Kiang Street by street, block by block, city by city, bombs fall. From way above, from the anonymous bombers’ point of view — which frames a hypnotically long nighttime sequence in Sergei Loznitsa’s new archive documentary — kilotons of explosives fall like rain, sprouting insignificant little splashes of fire below.

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.

John Cena has met a Ukrainian teenager with Down's syndrome who used him as inspiration while fleeing the country. The WWE legend travelled to the Netherlands to meet 19-year-old fan Misha Rohozhyn, who fled from Mariupol in March with his family amid the Russian invasion. During their journey, Misha's mother Liana motivated her son with a "motivational fantasy" that the Hollywood star would greet them at the end of their travels, and he was upset Cena wasn't there when they arrived in May.

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.

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.

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.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has announced that more than 1,000 Ukrainian pensioners who recently arrived in the UK after fleeing the Russian invasion are already receiving financial support through Pension Credit, new figures show.