Director and producer Betsy West is best known for her lively, intimate portraits of remarkable women: her documentary RBG, for example, a profile of the late US supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg; and Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down, about the US congresswoman who survived an assassination attempt in 2011.
Her latest project, though, is quite different. Once Upon a Time in Ukraine, which has been shortlisted for an Oscar, is a documentary she made working with footage she did not shoot on the ground herself. Instead, it was assembled by a Ukrainian team, headed by the director of photography, Andriy Kalashnikov. The material is, in some ways, more in tune with her old life as a news producer for ABC: the effect on Ukrainian children of Russia’s full-scale invasion. It is a huge story that has barely been told, and will reverberate for decades – if not generations – after the war has ended.
West’s task was to create a coherent story from the hours of footage. Working with an editor, Ilya Chaiken, West was very clear that the film should be snappy: a half hour. Its moment in the spotlight is politically freighted, when the Biden administration is replaced by Trump’s, and a question mark hangs over the US’s future relationship with Ukraine. “The incoming president says he wants to end the war quickly,” she says, speaking from her office in New York. “I guess the question is, what kind of an ending is it? At what price? How is this going to play out? And I don’t pretend to be an expert on this, but I do think that the timing is resonant, as US lawmakers are considering what to do.”
She also created an intriguing framing device for the documentary. One of its four main characters – kids aged between about eight and 12 – is Ivanna, a girl from the Kherson region, who spent 256 nights sleeping in a cellar. Her coping mechanism was drawing. With enormous creativity and imagination, she invented a cast of cartoon characters based on the fruit and vegetables that grow in such profusion in her part of Ukraine: pumpkins, watermelons, tomatoes. They became her imaginary defenders, zooming across the skies in a spaceship to protect Ukraine from the invaders. Brought to life by Ukrainian-American animator Sashko Danylenko, her drawings provide a gentle line through the film, a reminder of lightness and fun when the material is at times intensely dark. “Here is a girl,” says West, “who has survived a year in a cellar worrying about Russians coming in and just throwing a grenade down there, but her way of coping with it is so creative and resilient. I loved her spirit.”
Telling a story about children caught up in war is not straightforward. There are grave ethical concerns: asking a child to relive shelling, rockets, or their house burning down, might easily be retraumatising. At the same time, showing children creates an almost too-easy shortcut to viewers’ emotions. It would be easy to be manipulative. One Ukrainian film-maker I have interviewed has avoided showing children at all, considering it “kind of a cheap way to get audiences to empathise”. West is aware of the pitfalls. She emphasises that the film crew worked with a child psychologist. The field producer, Volodymyr Subotovskyi, made sure he spent extended periods with the children and their families. The children seem to talk comfortably on their own terms. The second character, a young boy called Ruslan, shows the crew around his little realm: the basement, stacked with jars and heaped with potatoes, where the family sheltered from rockets; the shell hole that has turned into a pond, where he fishes; the grand ruined house next door that is now a kind of playground. It is hard, as a British viewer, not to think of kids playing in ruined buildings after the Blitz. “I was just careful not to exploit the tears or the drama, and there wasn’t a lot of that in the interviews,” says West. There is a moment when Ruslan talks about one of his cats, which died. “But I don’t want to lean in on that,” she says. “It feels too intrusive to focus on that completely.”
One child in the film, Myroslava, a talented gymnast, has been to hell and back: she and her family escaped from besieged Mariupol. She remembers the city, now largely destroyed and under occupation, in the present tense. “There is a drama theatre there,” she says. Most viewers will know that there was a drama theatre there once, but no more: it was destroyed by Russian bombing, when hundreds of Ukrainian civilians were sheltering in the basement. Her father joined the armed forces, and was killed. There is phone footage of him swimming and playing with his daughter. Talking about him, she says: “He was strong, kind, fun, positive, beautiful.” That’s exactly how he does seem: little more than a boy himself.
At another point it, is clear that she has not absorbed the fact of his death. She wonders whether he has been injured, or has a concussion that means he has forgotten about them. The children are matter-of-fact and stoical about these unspeakable things that they can barely grasp. But the stories are altogether heartbreaking. “I hope,” says West, “that our film can affect people’s understanding of what is at stake here.”
Source: theguardian.com
