Film recommendation from the Kyiv Independent: ‘Volcano’ by Roman Bondarchuk (Patreon)

This is Francis Farrell, Kyiv Independent reporter writing this short recommendation; I’m not one to normally do a lot of film or book reviews as I don’t look back very fondly on high school English, but this is one Ukrainian film that I am pretty crazy about, and one that I think everyone should watch if they want to get a better understanding of the places and the people behind the events of the last 18 months, especially in southern Ukraine.

The first time I watched “Vulkan” (“Volcano”) by Roman Bondarchuk, I was blissfully hungover, alone with a flat white in my hand in a near-empty theater in London. Back then, I was already blown away by the film, by its magical realist plot and aesthetic, the feverish descent into and acceptance of anarchy, and the untamed, empty beauty of this part of the country in late summer.

The film follows Lukas, a Ukrainian from Kyiv working as a translator and driver for a big international organization who loses his car and colleagues while in the (literal) field in Kherson Oblast near the border with occupied Crimea.

As Lukas stumbles from one unfortunate event to another, he gradually loses not only his material possessions, but also any care or worry he had for his comfortable life back in Kyiv.

That first viewing of mine was three years before the full-scale invasion. Everything changes when you rewatch it now.

The film’s foreshadowing of key themes, events, and (I don’t know a better word than this sorry) pure vibes that have come to define the experience of being in wartime Ukraine is uncanny.

There’s the Kakhovka dam, of course, which plays a central role in the setting and in some of the film’s most ominous single shots. There’s the sending of young men off to war, with their local town doing what they can to fundraise for bulletproof vests. There is the keeping  of civilians in custody underground by ominous men in green.

Even the title “Volcano” was chosen, in the words of co-writer Daria Averchenko, to represent a sudden cataclysm that can occur in someone’s life. Hmmm.

But most importantly, it is the breaking down of societal rules, the breaking down of one’s life, and the breaking down of one’s grip on reality that hits hardest here. Whether it’s front-line areas like Bakhmut or the fields and villages of Kherson Oblast under the random violence of Russian occupation, watching this film from five years back takes me straight to what Ukrainians are going through now in the same places as where this was once shot.

The setting fits these themes. Kherson Oblast forms part of the “wild fields,” (dyke pole in Ukrainian), an empty steppe often forming the borderlands between warring factions, where rule of law was for centuries a fleeting reality.

“Vulkan” (“Volcano”) is available to stream in Ukrainian with English subtitles at a low price on Takflix, a Ukrainian movie streaming service.