Rule of Two Walls
Russia has been in a conflict with Ukraine for over 900 days. Russia attacked Ukraine to take back territory and destroy the identity of Ukraine. Even though the war continues, President Vladimir Putin has already lost in other areas.
During its barbaric incursions against Ukraine, which were aimed at replacing Ukraine’s sovereign and democratic government, erasing its internationally recognized borders and culture, and forcibly incorporating any surviving people into the Russian Federation, the Kremlin has turned the war into an existential struggle for the people of Ukraine, who have displayed incredible unwavering, intense fervor, and solidarity in the. In turn, while trying to impose Maoist China’s style of governance, Russia has only intensified the desire of the Ukrainians to defend their democratic ideals and create a distinct political, economic, and cultural identity outside the sphere of post Soviet Russian influence.
Putin’s imperial dream has been a failure that has pushed leaders and civilians sympathetic to Ukrainian nationalism and the brutality of his invasion has been a great unifier of support for Ukraine from Western and European nations. It speaks to the spirit of resistance still motivating Ukrainians in the present moment; for the millions of civilians who fled their homes and are overseas as refugees, millions of civilians stayed behind in Ukraine and continue to fight for their country.
In April 2022, just a month after he saw Russia invade Ukraine on a larger scale, he flew to Warsaw. Ukrainian American documentary filmmaker David Gutnik wanted to make a film about the people displaced by the conflict. However, upon learning of artists who had remained behind in the western city of Lviv, which is close to Poland, he changed his mind and crossed the border with the camera.
Filming for “Rule of Two Walls” commenced that month, and production finally concluded in Kyiv in November of the same year even as Ukraine faced blackouts due to Russian bombing of its energy facilities and other critical infrastructure. During the conflict, Russian forces engaged in countless bombing missions and city after city was turned into a war zone so the deafening sound of the air raid sirens became so frequent that many civilians simply chose not to go to their bomb shelters. After all, if today is the last day what’s the use of hiding and running around all the time?
It is these crippled psyches that the title describes, along with the oppressive reality that birthed it, the objective of which is to survive without ever leaving your home. Live with at least two walls between you and the blast zone. Hard to imagine but such compromise is a part of everyday life for people living in conflict.
What is fascinating about Gutnik’s film is what he shows as people’s everyday life in such surroundings yes, there are bombs and missiles, but life goes on. How can it be otherwise?
In Lviv, even the act of rising from sleep in the morning is a struggle, a beautiful one at that the beauty of the struggle is why Gutnik who combines narrative and documentary style in his film begins the action of his second film “Rule of Two Walls” with lovers in bet the lovers enjoying themselves before the alarms go off. And in concentrating on musicians, artists who somehow manage to create during the war, channeling their rage and sorrow into pencil strokes around the context of the song, Gutnik’s focus is primarily towards the questions like what place does the culture of Ukraine has in the society and the sense of the nation as well as how doing what an artist must do is essential for being a Ukrainian, of art as a weapon for the heart and mind.
“Culture is an activity and a product of a certain population” says Lyana Mytsko, the director of the Lviv Municipal Arts Center whose facility has been used as both a gallery and disciplinary actions haven in the current struggle.
“So it is impossible to have a country and a culture and vice versa. What Putin wants to say when he says we do not have a culture is that we do not have a country.” This explains why the Russian military command has systematically waged war against churches, museums and monuments in Ukraine as part of their barbaric assault, seeking to obliterate Ukraine’s culture and history as an independent nation in breach of international law.
As the violence allegedly unfolded, the popular talk show host became war correspondent for his documentary, scattered fragments of the playbill gutnik brings up depicting the Donetsk Regional Drama Theatre in Mariupol which was destroyed during Russian bombardment of Ukrainian cities, serving as a shelter to 600 people while the inscription ‘children’ was enormously painted on the ground at the front and rear entrances, making it visible from space. Diana Berg, one of the actresses and activists that had trained there, retells how she moved to Lviv and continued filming with the ambition to create ‘a different Mariupol’ than what remains of the city. She claims art for many of them is a way of ‘taking back power’, refusing to allow Ukrainians to die out in the war even when Russia is attempting to erase their existence and their past.
Yet another stunning sequence, without any spoken lines, moves to the center of Kyiv, into the lines of civilians who are gradually encircling with sandbags the statue of Taras Shevchenko, offering it up in sacrifice to the Russian missile strikes. The result is melancholic and at the same time quite optimistic, like this object is for the time being conceding its position to an installation which is younger and has been created to honor this monument. Here, this suggests the moment when the artists articulate their frustration with the fact that walls of Ukrainian architectures adorned with interior murals were later on whitewashed during the Soviet era. It is only in the wake of last demolished that many of such murals were discovered and are still being recuperated, a method of literally scraping out indecent colonial scholarship.
Members of Gutnik’s crew are soon included in the ensemble headed by the director. Like others interviewed in the film, other characters of the tale, cameraman and producer, sound recordist, are artists groping their way into the sense of the war, and one feels that they are constituents of the plot rather than supernumeraries. Rather than excluding visuals of each of the interviewees or mentioning locations perfect for use in the beginning, Gutnik keeps the tempo of the film quite upbeat, on the edge, which, according to him, is what he intends to achieve in the film.
The director of photography for this film, Volodymyr Ivanov, confronted Guntik. He was on a commute taking bodies out of bags in Bucha, which is close to Kyiv and the location where mass shooting of Ukrainian civilians and POWs was conducted by the Russian army. “War is the lack of everything,” Ivanov narrates adding the words that he has seen so much that feels unreal.
The “Rule of Two Walls” shifts the focus to Bucha and brings back reports of what he witnessed, including images depicting dead bodies that had been desecrated and set ablaze. Such images are gory, but also very important to the understanding of the extent of the devastation and deaths in Ukraine, the determination of people waging the war to protect their land, and unfortunately so, the reality of those who come to witness such horrific scenes.
Through it all, however, Gunitik also sees victory through the destruction of Ukraine’s history that he highlights through the incredible yet often painfully haunting work of various artists including a faceless Children’s Album who relays Junior boys’ enraged illustrations of the nightmares inflicted on women and children during the war, or lyrics where Slam Poets like Stepan Burban (alias Palindrom) say ‘I’ve not’ loved sufficiently, lived sufficiently long and I feel no guilt.
The gatherings held the attention of the film when in the autumn of 2022 the audience of the film joins a concert of Burban and his band and the young Ukrainians chanting the songs with rage and fervor become their enhanced signature.
But its final shot might be its most powerful there’s a little girl riding her bike and passing through destroyed freight train tankers, which is a low key but impactful image that speaks to the history, the present, the people of Ukraine and their hope.
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