Speaker 3
Porcelain may be recreated after thousands of years underground. And for us, it's a metaphor of Ukraine, because it's so easy to damage our, to take away part of our territory, to kill our people. But nobody can completely destroy Ukrainian culture, and nobody can take away our identity. Talk
Speaker 2
about some of the sculptures you make. What are they of?
Speaker 3
I really, we work in deep collaboration, and usually I'm creating the figurines, and Anja painting these figurines. and Anja's I'm so happy, I'm happy working any kind of collaboration and experience with movie, with this movie it was so beautiful amazing for me because it's other level of collaboration but we work in deep collaboration with Anja so many years and I'm happy because because Anja's language Anja's artistic language is so acceptable, so interesting for me. Her language is very metaphoric, and Anja's art is the source of metaphors in our movie, like these fragile dandelions, like these snails and their shell, like metaphor of home, and these snails without shell, like metaphor of refugees who lost their homes.
Speaker 2
Yeah. Snails were definitely a prominent figurine. Also, owlets, even a little dragon, I noticed. And as you say, Anya is painting things that are very metaphorical, but also very nature-based, it looks like, like things that are around you. Is that right, the nature around you?
Speaker 3
Yes, it's so true. Nature is source of our inspiration. And that time when we filmed, our nature in danger is under Shelling. And it was so important for us because in time of war, all is fragile, like porcelain. And we were so focused on every person or every piece of nature, every flower or tree in our movie. We filmed it like if it was last day of their existence because nobody knows about tomorrow, especially in the time of war. Paula,
Speaker 2
you also see these paintings that Anya does on the porcelain figurines animated. Why did you do that? They
Speaker 4
were originally, we originally were working with Slava and Anya on a animated series with the other co-director and producer. And so they had always seen their art as something that could be animated. When the war broke out, the conversations began about how can we use the figurines and that style of animation to help tell their story and use their language to talk about the war rather than showing war footage, which becomes very tiring for people. And it does look the same. And so using their language of art was a way that they could tell their story. So we were across the world in Zoom with them and asked them questions about their past life in Crimea, the day of the invasion, and their hope for the future. And we sent those stories to Blue Blue Studios in Poland, an animation studio, and they studied 20 years of Anya's art. And they hand drew 7,000 frames of art to put on these figurines and bring these stories to life.
Speaker 2
Yes, you used to be in Crimea. And then of course, you were in Kharkiv. I'm not sure if I'm saying that correctly, but that also has seen tremendous attacks as well from the Russian invasion. Slava, in addition to being an artist, you are a soldier, a former soldier. You were part of the Special Forces unit, and there are vivid scenes in the film of clashes with Russian soldiers. There are vivid scenes of you training civilians to be able to fire a gun and so on. We've heard reports of Ukraine's ranks being depleted after so many years of war. We're approaching the three-year mark. The difficulty of finding new training, difficulty of finding and training new recruits and things like that. I'm wondering where you are with your role as a fighter in Ukraine as well.
