In wretched times like ours, it’s an act of the utmost bravery to dare to imagine a future. While it’s already psychologically challenging to do so, it takes more than blind hope to make films about what’s to come, especially since cinema is a medium that is always already past, but continuously made in the future tense. Ukrainian director Valentyn Vasyanovych, whose previous two features – the imagined future Atlantis [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Valentyn Vasyanovych
fiche film] (2019) and the imagined past Reflection [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Valentyn Vasyanovych
fiche film] (2021) – premiered at Venice, brings his newest, To the Victory! to the Toronto International Film Festival’s Platform strand. Its cheery – or ironic – title frames the film as tonally ambiguous, and rightfully so, matching Vasyanovych’s own ambivalence towards what we call a filmic reality. In this feature, more than ever before, he mixes real reality and cinematic realism by not only casting his crew members in front of the camera, but also taking the lead role himself, as a director named Valyk who is trying to shoot a film about familial relationships after the war.

“One year after the war,” reads a title card in the opening scene, as Valyk and his son Yaroslav (Hryhoriy Naumov) are chatting over breakfast, until a voice yells, “Cut!” – evidently, this is a scene from Valyk’s film. Most of To the Victory! actually includes meta-narrative interjections, enough to destabilise a viewer’s idea of what is “true” and what is “fiction”: after all, Ukrainians who live in Kyiv have to fabricate their lives on a daily basis, given that their reality is one of violent paradoxes and death, also known as war.

On the radio, there’s talk about the demographic crisis gripping Ukraine after the war, and we learn that the movie takes place in 2026. It’s a good call to include such a detail in a throwaway comment, as it lets us know the future is near, but entirely impossible. Setting To the Victory! at a time a year from now completely transforms the fabric of the storytelling and shifts every paradigm that can be transposed over the film’s narrative. Like all of the films by the Ukrainian director, it consists of standalone scenes in long, static takes, where everything unfolds in dynamic counterpoints to the stillness of the camera, so the form does not override the content. However, the scenes are largely quotidian: family time, conversations with friends, a lot of drinking and heavy, unspeakable words weighing people down in every silence. Yet every episode emits a burning urgency under the cloak of daily life – is this a future, or a postscript?

Wartime trauma, distance and precarity can eat away at every strong relationship, and that’s the fear instilled in Valyk, too. His drive to make a movie about families dissolving in the aftermath of war while his own breaks down as well is perhaps an act of reparation. The future is as near as it is unreachable. Yet, Vasyanovych manages to achieve an emancipatory distance from his film that could have otherwise very easily collapsed, considering the little to no separation between cast and crew, but in the case of To the Victory!, it opens up space for existential crises: of a person, a family, a country and cinema as a whole.

To the Victory! is a Ukrainian-Lithuanian co-production staged by Arsenal Films and M-Films, in co-production with ForeFilms. Best Friend Forever handles the world sales.