Ukrainian Rhapsody in 16mm

The horrors of war have rarely been captured as poetically as in CPH:DOX opening film Mariinka (2026), Pieter-Jan De Pue’s incredible portrait of a Ukrainian town rent apart by the horrors of the Russian invasion. As stunningly shot as it is heartbreakingly told, this documentary might grow to be one of the definitive depictions of Europe’s greatest crisis since the late 90s.

Located in the heart of Donetsk, Mariinka no longer exists in any meaningful sense. Once home to thousands of people, it is now a ghost town under Russian occupation. And with people from the same families deciding to fight for different sides, it serves as a metonym for the region as a whole, bitterly divided by a pointless, bloody conflict. De Pue’s film starts with the feel of classical tragedy, with voiceover recounting a tale as old as time: two brothers who break their mother’s heart by fighting for opposite sides. But it’s also a tale of today, as two brothers from the same Zolotko family, Mark and Ruslan, find themselves fighting for Ukraine and Russia, respectively. Their stories are followed alongside the younger brother Daniil, living in America with his adoptive parents, as well as young paramedic Natasha, who doubles up as the film’s narrator — and its beating heart.

The doc is shot on 16mm Kodak Vision3 film, and the stock looks so good, it makes me wonder why more documentaries don’t utilise this truly cinematic format. Sun-dappled, dreamlike images, with light dripping into the frame, allow the colours to pop and to feel like we are there, well immersed inside the perception of our protagonists. But these aren’t just static, slow, arthouse frames; instead De Pue is happy to move the camera, Kalatozov-style, right along the ground, taking us behind the scenes of frightening conflict scenes, as well as utilising the power of montage and music (composers Mattis Appelqvist Dalton and Lieven Van Pée go for a very Phillip Glassian tone here, all repetitive, rising organs and etheareal vocals) to create a sensation of breathless identification with our beleaguered heroes.

Filmed over ten years, the longevity of the project allows for startling depth, as well as powerful smash cuts, like the pitch-perfect transition between Natasha exploring a burnt-out theatre and her graduation in the same spot several years before, or her jumping into water in traditional Carpathian garb before a transition into wartime fatigues, or Ruslan shooting his gun before a cut to a Ukrainian on the medical table. Putting all this together into just a 95-minute movie must have been a mammoth task: supervised by Alain Dessauvarge, the film lists six main editors, three additional editors, three editing assistants and a further four consultants. Despite the sheer amount of editors, it all flows like the work of a single genius, showing the unique power of cinema to collapse past and present within just the blink of an eye.

With the style of classic Ukrainian poetic realism, De Pue’s film is highly reminiscent of Parajanov’s early World War II masterpiece Ukrainian Rhapsody (1961), which, unlike anything else the auteur made, transcended the conventions of the traditional war picture to create something grand and otherworldly. It’s easy, in these current times, to see Ukraine merely as a wartrodden wasteland, to focus on devastated buildings and ravaged fields, but it’s much harder to dig deeper and find the beauty that still exists, and will always exist, under the face of fascist invasion.

Ukraine is a country with vast cultural richness, host to some of the best cinema in the world (much of it still to be properly celebrated, like the recent Berlinale retrospective hit Decay [Mykhailo Belikov, 1990]). And the uniqueness of that artistry, whether told with truth by insiders or with love by outsiders, becomes its own form of resistance. There’s so much more to talk about here — Angela’s hustle transporting back-and-forth over the border deserves its own movie —but I can’t fit it into just one review. I’ll only say four more: Mariinka is a masterpiece.