Ukraine documentary, Bond film & Spielberg's 'West Side Story' on OTT

For Indians, what’s unfolding in Ukraine is not just disturbing with innocents dying and cities being reduced to rubble, but also because many Indian students are tragically trapped in the war-torn country. People are rushing to read up about Ukraine and explainers about the war on different media are popping up, but Netflix offers an informative and riveting documentary, the Oscar-nominated Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom. It is a must-watch.

This one hour and 42-minute documentary doesn’t go into explaining what prompted Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine. However, it does give you a historical context to understand the current political situation in Ukraine and to get a glimpse of the fierce, independent spirit of the Ukranians who want ‘freedom’ at all costs.

The documentary also helps to understand why the Ukranians are putting up such a courageous resistance against the military might of the Russians. As the director of this documentary, the Israeli-American Evgeny Afineevsky says in a recent interview to an entertainment website about the plucky Ukrainians, “These people will not be slaves. They will not go back into the former Soviet Union…They will be fighting until the last drop of blood.”

Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom is based on a spontaneous revolution that broke out in November 2013, when a handful of young people began protesting in Kyiv’s central Maidan Nezalezhnosti – Independence Square – against then president, Viktor Yanukovych, after he refused to sign a free trade agreement with the European Union and for favouring closer ties with Russia.

The protest, which came to be known as the ‘Maidan Revolution’ or the ‘Revolution of Dignity’, lasted for 93 days. According to the documentary, in the end, 125 people were killed by government forces and 65 people went missing. But what is stunning is the fact that the protesters, who ran into thousands at one point of the resistance, managed to topple the president of that time. After seeing so many of their compatriots die, the protesters wanted nothing more than their president Viktor Yanukovych to step down. There’s even CCTV footage of Yanukovych boarding an aircraft and fleeing the country as well.

The documentary premiered at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival, and at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the People’s Choice Award for best documentary.

Also read: Westerners are trooping in to fight Russians. Is it a good move?

The documentary uses some incredible footage, some of which are difficult to watch – visuals of Ukraine’s special police force assaulting protesters with iron rods, blood-soaked protesters being taken away in stretchers, and a man being stripped nude in the bitter cold and paraded before people. Afineevsky led a large camera crew to the revolution site – as many as 28 cameramen are credited in the film, and they stayed with the protestors round the clock.

There are many visually captivating night shots of the protestors huddled around makeshift fires, sipping hot drinks served by volunteers; and wide angle shots of the Independence Square, especially with thousands holding lit phones singing Ukraine’s national anthem. The documentary also showcases interviews done later with the people, who had participated in the protest and which were filmed after the revolt had concluded. These interviews are interspersed with shots from the revolt.

Interestingly, the Maidan Revolution started with a journalist’s Facebook post calling people to the square to protest against the Ukraine president’s “blatant act of treachery”. The protest had people from different faiths and walks of life – Jews, Muslims, Christians, non-believers – who all came together to make “the idea of Maidan” work. At one point in the revolution, on December 11, the Berkut (military police force) launched a full-scale assault on Maidan, a priest in the St Michael’s Monastery rings all of its bells in warning. Apparently, it was the first time that every bell had been rung together since the Mongol invasion of 1240.

It is inspiring to watch people put their lives on the line for “freedom” and the film shows how this revolution was driven by people born in the ’90s, who came of age after the Soviet domination had been removed. “Once people have tasted freedom,” Afineevsky says, it’s hard to get them to return to tyranny.

According to Maidan uprising activists, it’s symbolic that Putin decided to start the war all around the dates of the Maidan uprising, which ended around February 22, eight years ago. “It is as if he is saying ‘Ok, you won the revolution, but here is the military scenario, and we’ll see who’s going to win now’,” said one activist to an international news channel, adding that Putin is mocking the anniversary of the Revolution of Dignity. Check it out.

Mr Jones inspires George Orwell’s Animal Farm

There’s another intriguing movie – Mr Jones – on Amazon Prime/MUBI based on Ukraine and made by a Polish filmmaker (who began her career as assistant to acclaimed directors Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda). It is a biographical thriller about the brave Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who risks his life to expose the truth about the devastating famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s.

According to the synopsis, Jones, who gained fame after his report on being the first foreign journalist to fly with Hitler, is now looking for his next big story.

Using his political position in the British government as a foreign affairs advisor to David Lloyd George, he gets privileged access to the Soviet Union and decides to travel to Moscow to get an interview with Stalin himself. There he meets Ada Brooks, a British journalist working in Moscow, who reveals that the truth behind the regime is being violently repressed.

Hearing murmurs of government-induced famine, a secret carefully guarded by the Soviet censors, Jones manages to elude the authorities and travels clandestinely to Ukraine, where he witnesses the atrocities of man-made starvation – millions left to starve – as all grain is sold abroad to finance the industrialisation of the Soviet empire.

Deported back to London, Jones publishes an article revealing the horrors he witnessed. But the starvation is denied by everyone, including western journalists reporting from Moscow, all under pressure from the Kremlin. As death threats mount, Jones has to fight for the truth.

Meeting a young author by the name of George Orwell, Jones shares his findings, helping to inspire the great allegorical novel Animal Farm. In a statement on the film, the director Agnieszka Holland, says that the key to the story for her was the story line of George Orwell writing his famous allegorical dystopian novel – Animal Farm.

“Jones discovering the truth about the mass murder of Ukrainian peasants somehow inspires Orwell’s story and becomes a part of it. We wanted the movie to be simple and real…We knew, when shooting this film, that we are telling an important timeless story. But only after I realised how relevant is today this tale about fake news, alternative realities, corruption of the media, cowardice of governments, indifference of people,” says Holland.

Daniel Craig makes one last pun and Spielberg’s West Side Story lands on Disney+Hotstar

There are major Hollywood biggies which are releasing this weekend. James Bond fans can bury themselves in Daniel Craig’s action-packed No Time to Die, which lands on Amazon Prime Video this Friday (March 4). Though the film was the highest grossing Hollywood film in 2021, outpacing even F9, critics felt the film was a tad too long.

But for diehard Bond fans, the film will be entertaining and gripping as it holds a gamut of emotions ranging from pathos, heartbreak, macabre horror and old-fashioned digitally contrived high-octane action. And, then there’s Daniel Craig (sigh!), who even gets to be cheeky, when he kills a villain with a  new watch gadget designed by Q. So, when Bond uses it in a fight with a henchman Primo, it causes his eye to spark and explode, killing him. Bond then uses this pun to update Q about his status, “I just showed someone your watch. Really blew their mind”. A pun delivered with Bond’s signature swag! Check it out.

There’s more Hollywood drama. Steven Spielberg’s, ode to the famous musical West Side Story, which has seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture is streaming on Disney+Hotstar. West Side Story tells the tale of fierce rivalries and young love in 1957 New York City. The film reportedly bombed at the box-office with analysts suggesting that the film suffered because it was targeted at older audiences, who were reluctant to return to cinemas during the COVID pandemic. Moreover, it lacked a major Hollywood star and was pitted against Spider-Man: No Way Home.

But the film gained rave reviews from critics for its interracial musical romance. Rolling Stones called it “classic Speilberg, classic movie-making, just classic period”. The director’s remake is both a hat-tip to the original (and old-school Hollywood) and a slightly revised version that gives this street-gang ‘Romeo & Juliet’ a sense of urgency, wrote the reviewer. A must-see for lovers of good cinema.