Vesna

In winter, a small town in Russian-occupied south-eastern Ukraine. A priest forced to store executed civilians in his church-turned-morgue secretly returns their bodies to their families. As liberation nears, preserving proof of war crimes outweighs saving his own life.

In an occupied Ukrainian town, a young priest secretly resists the invaders by returning the bodies of executed civilians to their families for proper burials. When an old man risks his life to bury his son, the priest’s compassion draws the attention of both the occupiers and their collaborators. Torn between faith, fear, and guilt, he continues his silent defiance, aided by a few brave townspeople. Amid the terror of war, a lonely boy – the son of a collaborator – becomes a witness to hidden acts of dignity and betrayal. As liberation nears, the choices of each reveal the true cost of humanity under occupation.

Director's note

On 24 February 2022, the nationwide Russian invasion of Ukraine began. The history of the twentieth century had not spared us a war on European soil. And it was there, in Ukraine, that my real home remained – the one I occupied from my very first steps after being born in Lithuania, the country where my parents had emigrated for work in the 1990s. It was a house in the city of Dnipro, bordering the river of the same name. In 2014 I left Ukraine, and it will soon be eight years since I have been living in Paris. Today, my life is in France. From being a professional football player back home, I became a filmmaker here. As the years went by, I felt more and more nostalgic for my country. Sometimes, it prevented me from living. So I decided to put all my efforts into rebuilding a new home here in Paris. And the past then stayed in the past. But when I woke up on the morning of 24 February 2022, all those efforts shattered: my real home was in Dnipro.
Accompanied by my producer, Helena Pokorny (Matka Films) – a decisive encounter during my academic path at La Fémis and with whom I developed all my projects – I decided a year ago to return to Ukraine to make a documentary film about people’s lives under war. I filmed faces. I remember their empty, sometimes haunted eyes. I also saw a kind of strange burst of laughter. An ironic laughter. These were not laughing eyes.
It is those gazes that I want to transpose into my cinema. They frightened me because they reflected something broken inside those people. I want to talk about that: about what it means to no longer be able to live a normal life. I did not see hope for this “normal life” in people – neither in the elderly nor in the young. And I want to find that hope.
From the very first stages of making this feature-length documentary in Ukraine, I asked myself about the future of the country and of the people I had filmed. Who will build it? I think it will be the younger generations, those who are growing up under war as children. Can one have a future without hope? And where does that hope reside? This question seems crucial to me, because it is not one that a child should have to face, and yet it is their daily reality in Ukraine today. Not having found an answer among the people I filmed in my documentary, I felt the need for fiction to formulate and reflect on this issue. The absence of hope in these people and their refusal to speak of it – they did not know how to – made me search for a space to tell that hope. And that space is fiction: it is this narrative form that allows me to develop the questions provoked by my stay in Ukraine. People’s lives are marked by an aberration: today, children and young people must grow up in a world inhabited only by death. But I know something must oppose this way of life. And it is out of the necessity of answering this question that the idea of“Vesna” (“Spring”), my first fiction feature film, was born. It was nevertheless essential for me to write a realistic screenplay, based on thorough documentation and on my knowledge of the country and of the current situation.
Vesnais not a war film. The story tells of an attempt to save innocence in a world corrupted by violence.
The events of Vesna take place under occupation, in winter, in a small town in south-eastern Ukraine, for example, a city like Tokmak.
Through the psychological trajectory of the main character - the Priest - I seek to formulate a moral dilemma: in a world where normal life no longer exists, doing what one believes is right becomes a challenge when resistance costs lives. Should one stop resisting against the ruling power when other people’s lives are put in danger? And above all, how can one live with oneself when one no longer corresponds to the moral image one has imposed upon oneself?
This dilemma experienced by the Priest allows me to search, more universally, for the essence of resistance. Is it disobedience towards the occupier, or rather the attempt to preserve within oneself a small something that gives hope for another life?
It is through a mirror construction that the Priest’s character functions, constantly dialoguing, directly and indirectly, with the character of Makarov, an 11-year-old boy. Despite the war context, Makarov remains a child. He is preoccupied with problems of his age. He is bitter and lonely, and it is only through meeting the Priest that he finds someone who shows him compassion. On his side, the Priest discovers in Makarov a fragile innocence threatened by war.
When I speak of innocence, I do not mean being shielded from war, being blind to the world. Makarov is not. When I speak of innocence, I mean being someone who, despite full awareness of the situation, does not betray himself. The Priest fails – people die because of him. He feels guilty because he becomes one of the causes of evil. But not Makarov. Preserving innocence means that war does not morally corrupt this child, does not push him to betray his own identity. Through the encounter between these two characters, and the Priest’s personal failure, the film addresses the question of future and hope. As the story progresses, the Priest faces an obvious truth: innocence can only be embodied by a child, because the child, in his naïveté toward the world, represents candour, unlike adults, who are deprived of it. Makarov’s candour then becomes the only possible foundation for building another world where trauma does not occupy all the space. It is therefore only the younger generation who is capable of embodying hope for a better world. The character of Makarov represents a symbol perhaps too heavy for his shoulders, but such is the reality of young Ukrainians today.
I thus wanted to construct the story around this dialogue between an adult and a child. The Priest is as lonely as Makarov, and vice versa. Both attempt to resist: the Priest through the grand history – that of moral duty – Makarov through the small history, that of his torn shoes. He understands that because of the occupation, he will not get new shoes. But seeing the world through this small window proves just as courageous as an act of resistance.
This question of innocence is not only at the heart of these characters. It is the condition of the world I seek to create in Vesna. This question also touches those against whom one resists.
In war reports and documentary films, the enemy is omnipresent but invisible. So I wanted to give him a tangible presence. Thus was born the character of Igor, a Russian captain. He believes in Russian propaganda and in his liberating mission in Ukraine. Through this character, I seek to understand how a man can commit atrocities without questioning the reasons that push him towards extreme violence. And the answer is absolute faith in his mission. But little by little, he realises that the war machine will destroy him too. He fears for his life, as he understands that he is merely a puppet of no importance. His power is only circumstantial. War destroys not only the oppressed but also the oppressors.
The world surrounding these characters is immaculate and silent. The universe is white with snow. Snow has the power to bring both a sense of purity and of emptiness. At home, in winter, nights are scarcely dark, because the snow lights up the surroundings by reflecting the moonlight. The killings of Ukrainian civilians happen at night. So do the attempts at burials. But the night is never truly black. It hides nothing. The night is transparent.
I remember those nights. I remember the sound of falling snow. It resembles timid rain. You hear it in moments of silence. I remember that sound. I remember the silence of the night. The empty streets. I remember the wrecked roads nobody repaired. The cars limping along those streets. I remember the rare streetlamps, often broken, dimly lighting the surroundings. The residential neighbourhoods with single-storey houses. I remember those apartment blocks – the Khrushchyovkas – those five- or nine-storey buildings that disfigured the country’s architecture in the 1960s. I also remember the faces of Ukrainians – the faces I grew up with, often tired and stern, but behind which, just as often, there was a gentleness toward others. I remember the cold. So strong that I felt I could lose my fingers on the way home. The warm home.
I would like to shoot this film in Lithuania, the country where I was born, where I can find these landscapes, these sounds, these lights.
Visually, the film’s universe will be divided into two. On one side, the world of night and violence, where bodies lost in the darkness are destroyed. All the action takes place at night: it must be sudden and tense, like a cry – a burst of speed in a slow world. It is important for me to film all the violence suffered by the characters in the darkness, at night. Because the purpose of the film is not to show violence but what it does to humans. That is why rape, murders, and corpses will be filmed in darkness, almost off-screen.
The second world is that of the day, where we follow the emotional progression of the characters – the one where emotion cannot hide in the dark. And it is at these moments that I want to take the time to show the emotional transformation of the characters. These shots will last longer and be less fragmented.
Shadow and light, contrast, night – these then have a real narrative value for me in “Vesna.” To this is added the special treatment of sound, this unique sound of war. When I returned to Ukraine a year ago, I was deeply struck by the sound of the cities. It is a mixture of two things: first, the absolute silence in which the falling snow, the footsteps of passers-by, the cries of birds, and the rare cars seem almost incongruous. Every movement is heard in this silence, and sometimes it terrifies through its emptiness. Second, the deafening noises of sirens, around which nothing else can be distinguished. Because of the sirens, silence became heavy, like a premonition – the threat of a catastrophe. I want to build the sound of the film on this coexistence: morbid silence and the noise of bombardments.
In Ukraine, the people I observed and met behaved, at first glance, normally, but within each person there was a fracture, a kind of madness, an inner scream that resurfaced from time to time. I want to transpose this complexity into the actors’ performances: a very naturalistic acting, but in which, from time to time, appears a fracture provoked by the unbearable context of life. It is not necessarily manifested in speech, but also in glances, gestures, ways of holding themselves. These would be fragile and slow bodies, curling in on themselves more and more. And their eyes no longer see the world around as it is, as if through a veil.
Since 24 February 2022, I think of my home and my country. I cannot speak of anything else. War consumes people. I have seen it.
Despite the dreadful fate of Ukrainians, young and old, saving the innocence of a child gives the only hope that a normal life is possible, once the horror disappears – that horror which is war. And I feel I must speak about it. To remain silent, for me, would mean forgetting, pretending this tragedy is not happening. It would mean losing the hope that one day the war will end and that normal life will prevail again.

Screenwiter's note

Subjects:
human rights, death, childrens rights, children, war