[MUSIC]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Every year in Oscar season, most of the media focus on the competition for best picture and best actors. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but in this show with our non-fiction bent, we invite the makers of the five films nominated for best feature-length documentary. We'll do another one of those interviews now. The nomination film is called Porcelain War. The premise, Ukraine is like porcelain, easy to break but impossible to destroy.

Porcelain War won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. It largely tells the story of one of the filmmakers himself, Slava Leontyev, who is an artist who works in ceramics, yes, in porcelain, but has had to learn to make war in addition to making art. Slava will join us in a minute along with co-director Brendan Bellomo. The film is in Ukrainian, so I won't play a dialogue clip, but it also features music by the Ukrainian band DakhaBrakha. To set the audio scene for you a little bit, here are a few seconds of their music from the film.

[MUSIC - DakhaBrakha: Baby]

Brian Lehrer: I'm ready to cancel the segment and go to a concert by DakhaBrakha in the Oscar-nominated documentary Porcelain War. With me now are the directors, Slava Leontyev and Brendan Bellomo. Thank you for joining us. Congratulations on your nomination and welcome to WNYC.

Brendan Bellomo: Thank you for having us, Brian.

Slava Leontyev: Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Slava, can you describe your art for our radio audience to begin, the figurines and other pieces that you make and the role of your wife and creative partner Anya in painting them?

Slava Leontyev: Yes, we are porcelain artists. It's our very first movie, but our art and Anya's painting inspired us. Her metaphoric, artistic language, we used when we make our movie, we used for animation. It inspired us about our point of view to nature and even to this destruction during the war.

Brian Lehrer: You're an artist, but you're also a soldier, we learn in the film, who trains civilians in how to use guns when they suddenly have to be trained to defend the country. Did you have a military background before this war?

Slava Leontyev: No, I have not any military background. Since an action of Crimea, we completely understood the war will come. Big war will come to us because this election was never punished and aggressor was really inspired. We established our military preparation with our friends. When big war was broke out, we was ready. We have enough skills to be invited to our special force. I used my skills to teach civilians how to use firearm because thousands and thousands of people, civilian people who never touched the guns before came to army as volunteers in my native city. It was completely dangerous situation.

Brian Lehrer: We'll bring Brendan here in just a second. Slava, how in general do you relate to or integrate these two sides of yourself, artist and warrior? Are they kind of the opposite of each other or is that too simplistic a way to look at it?

Slava Leontyev: It's realistic mix and surrealistic situation to have the war right outside our door. We have no choice. It's our life right now, but we are still the same peaceful people. We are using any opportunity to close this door and continue to make our art and develop culture because culture is main target of this aggression, because aggressors trying to erase our identity and culture and art. They are the source of our resilience and it's a way of our resistance. Not only firearms but camera also.

Brian Lehrer: Brendan, for you as the other director of the film Porcelain War, now nominated for an Oscar for best feature-length documentary, how do you see the relationship between the art-making scenes in the film and the battle scenes? What kind of juxtaposition for the audience are you trying to create?

Brendan Bellomo: Thank you for this question, Brian. It's not a contrast that we placed upon the footage of the film. It's actually a juxtaposition that comes from their lives. When we started to receive the footage Slava was filming, it was so apparent that on one roll, one day, they would be filming nature that inspired their artwork. The next, Slava would be going out on a mission.

That contrast was just built in by the fact that the notion of the front line as a word is a misnomer in this conflict. They don't go to war. It literally is right outside their doorstep. The idea that during shelling, during an active and unprovoked attack on their city, they chose to create something is an act of resilience. If you look at the concept of war, the first thing that comes into your mind is the opposite of that is peace and tranquility. The true opposite of war is creation.

Through their creativity, there is an act not only of preservation of their story, of keeping a record of what they're going through, a personal testament of their emotional truth, but the act itself of creating is to say, "We're not going to succumb to fear and be inspired by the destruction around us to be in a passive and depressed state. We're going to embrace the joy of life and living in creativity." That's the true form of resistance, so what they're doing is absolutely incredible.

Brian Lehrer: Slava just said something very profound in his last answer. I wonder if you would also give us your impressions of if this is what is happening in the war in Ukraine, because I don't think a lot of Americans think of it like this, that it's not just Russia wanting to take land. It's Russia wanting to destroy Ukrainian culture. Do you see it that way and do you think that's reflected in the film?

Brendan Bellomo: I think it's undeniable. When Russia first invaded, they attacked universities. They destroyed museums. So many artists, teachers, writers, scientists, people who contribute to culture were killed. That loss is absolutely terrible. By staying to create art, they are resisting that cultural destruction. By definition, that type of attempted erasure is genocidal in nature. People have to remember that. As you're saying, Brian, it's not just that they're seeking to take over territory and resources or land. They're trying to erase what it is to be Ukrainian. As artists, they're in a prime position to create something new and say, "No, we're going to be here forever. This is who we are."

Brian Lehrer: Slava, can I ask you something about training civilians for war under these circumstances as you do? I've read that as the war has gone on for years now, Ukraine has had to rely on older people increasingly to become soldiers, not just the young adults who are usually military recruits. Are you training people in their 30s, 40s, 50s to be soldiers for the first time?

Slava Leontyev: No, we have maybe oldest army in whole world. From the very beginning, we tried to save, to defense our young guys. We did not mobilize people before 28 or 25 later because these people who came as volunteers, sometime they was really old. Maybe 55. I am 57. Sometime there was just pregnant girls and really sick people. They was really unprepared and it was a horrible situation. They get this AK rifle. They never used firearm before. The first, what I taught was security. Not how to use the weapon, how to escape dangerous of weapon connected to your body.

Brian Lehrer: How to escape danger with a weapon connected to your body. Is that training different than for a 20-year-old if you're giving it to a 40-year-old, 50-year-old?

Slava Leontyev: Of course, of course. Sometimes it was really difficult because even to people, these old people sometimes was not able just to run fast or sitting in calm and stabilize this weapon. They need just fix some medical issue. I'm so happy. Our cinematographer, painter in origin, his first-time cinematographer, Andrey Stefanov, who helped me on shooting range. He's tai chi master. He really understand how the human body worked. He helped me a lot with people who had really serious issues.

Brian Lehrer: Brendan, would you describe for our listeners your general role as co-director of this film? It's a first-person story for Slava. It's his own story. How about for you?

Brendan Bellomo: This co-direction is a deep collaboration, but I think that's very unexpected given all the factors that contributed to this. Slava and I had actually connected before the war because one of our producers grew up under Russian oppression in communist Poland and she discovered Anya and Slava's work. Aniela and I and also Slava and Anya planned on making an animation project together.

We had connected and started to develop an artistic trust. Then the war broke out and we called up Slava, discovered he was in the Ukrainian special forces and decided to send a camera. The idea behind this was for them to be able to begin capturing their emotional truth, their story from within, a personal perspective. Originally, I'd actually wanted to go there in support of Slava with the crew, but they started sending some footage back.

It was so personal. It was so incredibly immersive. We felt the ideal scenario for the ultimate vérité filmmaking would be for us to work together but at a distance. At the time, we were separated by 6,000 miles. Slava's English has become amazing, but he didn't speak a word of the same language. I didn't speak Ukrainian at the time either. We could only communicate over Zoom through an interpreter.

We said, "Despite being separated by the largest conflict in Europe since World War II, different countries, different time zones," we said, "we're going to figure this out." We worked with an interpreter over Zoom. We created an impromptu film school where Slava and Andrey could transfer and really move their instincts as artists into cinema. We would get together every day.

We would look at not just how the camera works. It's not about exposure or focus, things like that. It's about the language of film. We actually started to draw together. We would share little sketches that became storyboards. We'd look at paintings that we loved. We realized we were fluent in the universal language of visual art. This enabled an incredible collaboration despite everything working against us.

Brian Lehrer: Well, Slava, for somebody who's so new to English, you're doing great in this interview. I'll come back to you in a second. Let me follow up, Brendan, with you on something that you just referred to or really a person you just referred to, which is their friend, Andrey, also featured in the film, a painter who is suffering in a different way than the married couple, Slava and Anya, because he is separated from his wife and two daughters who are away in the relative safety of Lithuania. Andrey is behind the camera to shoot some of the footage in the film. Unlike Slava or Anya, he stops making his art. He stops painting. Why did Andrey stop painting?

Brendan Bellomo: I think the amount of absolute despair and depression to have your family not only separated from you but to lose that time that you had together in a way where it can never be recovered. His girls are growing up without him physically there. The sacrifice, the bravery that he made to get them to safety in the first days of the war is a terrible, two-pronged act.

Your goal is to keep your family safe. In doing so, you're tearing your family apart. It's an experience that millions of Ukrainians are going through, millions of Ukrainian families. It's just heartbreaking. Yes, at the beginning of the war, he absolutely stopped painting because your soul is empty. What happened is when Slava presented Andrey with the possibility to say, "Would you be interested in helping record our lives?" and he started to take up the camera, it became a new paintbrush for him.

His work in the film, I'm so incredibly grateful that we had him. Because to be a cinematographer, it's not about knowing a technical thing. He knew where to put his canvas. His work has been nominated for an American Society of Cinematographers Award, which is absolutely, maybe even unheard of for somebody's very first footage, not just his first feature. Andrey is a master storyteller. I think in telling his story, I know he believes. Hopefully, it can help other families and his own.

Brian Lehrer: That's a wonderful story. Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking with Brendan Bellomo, who's just speaking, and Slava Leontyev, who are the co-directors of the Oscar-nominated documentary Porcelain War, about the intersection of art and the defense of their country in Ukraine. It also won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance last year. Slava, in the film, we see your wife, Anya, painting not just your porcelain figurines, but now also drones that Ukraine uses in the war. How did she feel or how did you feel about that kind of creative beauty adorning a weapon sent out to destroy even in defense?

Slava Leontyev: Anya who's painted this drone only because my commander asked her paint our drones in bright colors. Just make it easy to find these drones if they fell down in grass far from our position. Of course, Anya cannot just paint to make some kind of beauty and something individual and just give our soldiers opportunity to smile when they saw this face on these drones, this funny picture. It's our work. It's our kind of our everyday activity, our activity in culture and art and why we filmed what we filmed.

We trying to save our identity. What is our identity now? What does it mean to be Ukrainian now? It's not about our ethnic origin because majority of my friends are not ethnic Ukrainians. It's not about native language of their parents because majority of us on Eastern Ukraine are native Russian speakers. To be Ukrainian, it means to choose freedom, to choose democracy against totalitarian lifestyle, what came to us from Russia.

Because this what we defend, what we are defending right now, defending our uniqueness, our humanity, because we were focused on diversity of uniqueness of every part of nature, of every person. It was senseless for us. Just film destruction and kind of news footage. Our story is very personal story. What we filmed, we filmed like if it was last day of their existence because all is so fragile during the war.

Brian Lehrer: Can I ask you, why do you think Vladimir Putin wants to rule Ukraine? Is it just for the macho glory of rebuilding a Russian empire or for some valuable resources that Ukraine has or because he thinks it's a hedge against invasion by the West? What's your own take on why this war is even happening?

Slava Leontyev: It is not personal choice of Vladimir Putin. It's main idea of Russia to be empire. After Russia lose Cold War but not completely lose, they are trying to rebuild the Soviet empire and impact in Europe and finally empire need to take new territories. Empire cannot survive if empire cannot get new territory. That is why this war and other war like Chechen war, like war in Afghanistan, like all wars, what Soviet Union having his history, it's continuous of this for empire conquest.

Brian Lehrer: If I can ask you one more political question, we now see President Trump trying to push for some kind of an end to the war. His defense secretary has already said, there's no going back to pre-2014 borders before that year's Russian invasion. As of when we're recording this, Trump hasn't yet mentioned anything. He wants Russia to give up. If you're comfortable even addressing this topic, can you see the outlines of a peace agreement that most Ukrainians would prefer over continued bombardment?

Slava Leontyev: Anyone can lose, especially if someone want to lose. It's not our way. We have no choice. We are trying to defend our existence. We are strong. Ukraine is able to fight back against Russia and nobody else. Nobody else have this experience in Europe, for example. Our movie, it's also example of success. Because in our movie, regular civilian people are able to defend independence, to preserve humanity, and even develop culture in so dark times. Main message of our movie, resistance is possible for everyone in any situation.

Brian Lehrer: Through military means and through art, right?

Slava Leontyev: We were focused on art. We were focused on beauty because our culture is the source of our resilience, because our culture is way of our resistance, and because our culture is main target of this aggression.

Brian Lehrer: Brendan, last question. For you as co-director, making art is a juxtaposition with making war in the film. What do you think it'll feel like being in Hollywood? I assume you're both going with the glitz and glamour, considering the subject matter of the documentary.

Brendan Bellomo: I think a celebration of this story comes down to one thing. It's honoring their bravery in risking their lives to tell the story. It's shining a light on what's happening in Ukraine. Not through the usual channels of looking at a mainstream media coverage of it, but humanizing what's happening, recognizing that democracy and freedom are at risk around the world now more than ever. That front line, it requires the participation of culture, of art, of everyday people, and that resistance is possible through hope and through beauty and through creating something. We're incredibly grateful for that recognition and really excited to share the story on that stage.

Brian Lehrer: Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev, directors of the Oscar-nominated documentary Porcelain War. The latest in our series of interviews on this show with the makers of all five of those non-fiction films. Thank you so much for joining us and good luck at the Oscars. Slava, good luck at home in Ukraine.

Slava Leontyev: Thank you.

Brendan Bellomo: Thank you kindly.

Slava Leontyev: Thank you so much.

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