Film about war in Ukraine wins Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival – photo
Porcelain War, a documentary about the war in Ukraine, has won a Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Sundance, one of the largest independent film festivals, ended in Park City, Utah, on Sunday, 28 January.
The film, directed by Brendan Bellomo (USA) and former soldier Slava Leontiev (Ukraine), won the Grand Jury Prize in the US Documentary category.
"Resisting totalitarian aggression is necessary but holding on to your humanity amidst the onslaught is the ultimate pursuit of good. The making of this film – a film full of pathos and violence, porcini and dragonlets – is in and of itself this pursuit," the festival jury noted.
The jury added that they had awarded the prize to Porcelain War "for its unwavering voice from inside the brutal war in Ukraine calling us to care about those who would sacrifice their lives to defend their humanity and ours."
🏆 The U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary goes to PORCELAIN WAR, directed by Brendan Bellomo & Slava Leontyev. #Sundance pic.twitter.com/UZi3n2Dqyl
— Sundance Film Festival (@sundancefest) January 26, 2024
"This award celebrates the courage and beauty of the people of Ukraine," said director Brendan Bellomo in his reaction to the win.
Porcelain War tells the story of three Ukrainians – Slava Leontiev, his wife Ania Stasenko, and Andrii Stefanov – who make porcelain animal art. The artists stay in Kharkiv, which has been under Russian attack since the first day of the invasion, and continue to create as the war rages, creating porcelain figurines with which they decorate houses that have been destroyed by shelling.
"How does one continue to live when everything you love is under a vicious attack? Porcelain War argues that you can learn to fight back using all the tools you have, including your art, in order to avoid erasure," the film's description reads.
About the festival
The Sundance Film Festival is the largest festival of independent auteur films in the United States. It is held annually in January in Park City, Utah. This year the Sundance Film Festival celebrated its 40th anniversary. It ran from 18 to 28 January.
It is organised by the Sundance Institute, founded by American actor and director Robert Redford in 1981 to promote the emergence of a new, independent vision in American cinema.
Last year at Sundance, 20 Days in Mariupol won the Audience Choice Award in the World Documentary Competition. The film, directed by Mstyslav Chernov, is about the early days of the Russian army's attack on Mariupol, Ukraine, in February and March 2022. A few days ago it was shortlisted for a 2024 Academy Award in the Best Documentary category.
In addition to Chernov's film, another documentary about the war in Ukraine, Iron Butterflies by Roman Liubyi, was screened at Sundance 2023.
The first Ukrainian feature film to be shown at the Sundance competition, in 2022, was Klondike by Maryna Er Horbach. It tells the story of a family at the epicentre of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crash on 17 July 2014 in the village of Hrabove, Donetsk Oblast.
That same year, the festival also hosted the world premiere of A House Made of Splinters, a documentary about children in an orphanage in Lysychansk, directed by Simon Lereng Wilmont.
In 2020, Ukrainian filmmaker Iryna Tsilyk won a Sundance Film Festival Award for Best Director for her documentary The Earth Is Blue as an Orange.
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