MILITANTROPOS

Synopsis

MILITANTROPOS captures the human condition through the fractured realities of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The film pieces together everyday lives transformed by war – those who flee, those who lose everything, and those who stay to resist and fight – tracing both the instinct to survive and the need for closeness. Amid devastation and atrocity, the human is absorbed into war – and war, in turn, becomes part of the human.

Statement of the directors

MILITANTROPOS is a neologism created by our colleague and friend Maksym Nakonechnyi. While working on the film, we talked a lot as a team, asking questions and searching for answers. One of the main things we agreed upon was that aggression and war try to wipe out not only people, cities, and villages, but also the meanings that identify us. We realised that in order to continue, we needed to find – or even create – senses that would help us personally go through this experience.
We worked on the concept and texts for the film's intertitles with our friend, philosopher Oleksandr Komarov. Oleksandr joined the army at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, and his personal experience allowed us to collectively find and formulate meanings that reveal the transformation that happens to a human inside the war.
War is a fact that people face – and that distorts their existence. A human finds themselves in a situation of choice without choice, where they are free only to choose how to react. Thus, a person freely chooses an experience that can become a relentless one. This borderline experience transforms people both individually and collectively – and this transformation is irreversible.
This is where it becomes important to understand why the film is a collective portrait. In the film's scenes, we meet another human – their actions, their face – and through this encounter, we can glimpse the collective experience, the integrity of the transformation process.
So, what is war?
It is a universally substantial experience – and at the same time, an encounter with possible non-existence. An encounter with death, which can become both a personal and a collective non-existence. This experience of facing death becomes a borderline experience, forcing a human being to reflect on the very nature of existence. Discussing all these thoughts together, we decided to expand the usual film form and add short texts: texts that express, in our opinion, the individual and collective transformation of a human inside the war.

Review

Screen International Review