With “Atlantis”, Valentyn Vasyanovych turned the bleak aftershocks of war into visual poetry
, “Atlantis” depicts the grim aftermath of a war between Ukraine and Russia. Ukraine has prevailed, but at great cost. The groundwater is poisoned. Muddy landscapes are dotted with scarred buildings and rusted machinery. Workers in white bodysuits exhume corpses, enumerating details of the remains.
Filming took place in and near Ukraine’s eastern city of Mariupol in 2018, four years after Russia seized Crimea and began to foment a separatist war nearby. After editing a rough cut, Mr Vasyanovych deemed the film incomplete. It took six more months to devise a handful of additional scenes. One of them became the film’s emotional peak—a kiss between Sergiy and a paramedic who volunteers to identify bodies with Black Tulip, a Ukrainian organisation that does that in real life.
This is lending the film a “prophetic” status, says Charles Bin of Best Friend Forever, a Brussels sales agent. As a result, distributors have registered their interest and “Atlantis” is now available on several streaming services, including Amazon Prime, HBO Max, iTunes and MUBI. The film will soon appear in cinemas in Japan and, on April 11th, in Italy.
Whatever the war’s outcome, “Atlantis” suggests that the scars will be deep. Mr Vasyanovych’s subsequent feature, “Reflection”, offers another such warning. That film, which had its premiere last year, bears an equally chilling message for Ukrainians at risk of subjugation by Russia: it is about torture in a secret prison run by Kremlin-backed separatists in a part of eastern Ukraine occupied since 2014.
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