Ukrainians like to watch comedies

I have never heard an audience so silent.

When the credits roll a screening of 2000 meters to Andrivkano one in Kyiv Cinema moved. Their popcorn and beer are largely unrefined.

The documentary by Mstyslav Chanov is a frontline film that makes you feel like you are trapped in the terrible trenches next to the soldiers.

Seeing that in Ukraine, a country on fire, the energy is multiplied.

At the beginning of the full invasion of Russia in 2022, as the society moves to protect itself, Ukraine will have little capacity for culture. Places were closed or repurposed, some were attacked, and artists became refugees or soldiers.

Almost four years on, the arts are back – but everything is now consumed by the war.

The change struck me on a recent trip to Kyiv.

I found that the walls of the city are filled with two types of posters: Fundraisers for the frontline forces – or films, plays and shows about the war.

Andriivka it’s not just the hard hitting film that’s on offer: there are ads for that too Cuba and Alaskaanother powerful documentary that follows two women’s medical battles in a way that manages to be funny, scary and sad at the same time.

There is also an unedited photo.

The Old Lenin Museum, now the Ukrainian House, hosts a giant log of the work of documentary photographer Oleksandr Glyelov.

Spread over three floors of a modernist building, his images capture the length of Ukraine’s struggle for independence: 35 years of trying to defend itself from Russian Control.

In the section devoted to 2022 and beyond, he shows his photographs of the bodies of the victims on the ground like graves.

Others I spoke to in Kyiv were far from all of this.

War is their reality: it keeps them going at night, with air defense systems and missile warnings. It’s all over their social media feed and in their fear for friends and family who are fighting.

This is the last thing they want more of, on stage or screen.

But others are clearly drawn to it.

Andriivka Chernov’s latest production after his film from besieged Mariupol won the Oscar.

His focus this time is a 2km-long rubber estate in eastern Ukraine. The soldiers called it a forest, although it was only a line of scraggy trees separating them from the Russian positions. Their mission is to go through it and return to Andrivka, which hangs the national flag of Ukraine.

So the men in the ditch scuttle between the foxholes, guided by soldiers in the background who keep an eye on the drones and warn of any threat they see. They control troops in real life like in a computer game but their faces are stony, their focus is on the whole.

Soldiers’ lives depend on them.

When it was over, the audience around me seemed shocked.

“The one I know in this movie, was a soldier, and he died,” Yulia shared, when people later filed into the foyer.

He said it was a heavy watch. “I think we should do it, though. We can’t forget them.”

An old man openly admits that he watched the film through tears. “Some times it was really, really hard,” Taras said.

But he is sure that such films are needed.

“Maybe people will realize that Ukraine needs all the help possible to end this,” Taras argued. “Many people were killed because we refused to be who we are. We are not Russian.”

It’s not just the “serious” arts that are at war these days. Musicals, the ultimate form of escapism, are also in the works.

Up the road from the cinema, I saw a banner for the latest offering from the Kyiv Opera: Tawiatoa Stone Opera in two acts.

“This is the story of any of us,” explains the director, who takes the hero on a journey through the recent history of Ukraine – from the revolution to the war.

All the songs are popular anthems of Ukrainian independence so that the listeners of the first night together, were swept off their feet. There were cheers for the policeman on stage in a fat suit doing pelvic drops, and the woman in a leotard and tie waving at a picture of Vladimir Putin.

It’s a million miles from the movies that watch silence on the trail.

But Director Petro Kachanov told me that even theater music has a mission today.

“We must do everything to show that Russia is our age-old enemy,” he candidate. “The Russians are not our brothers. They are killing our people. They want to take away our freedom and we have to say it.”

His team pressured him to give the show a happy ending for a public tired of four years of open war, but he refused.

“This game is a tribute to those who died in this war,” he told me. “And we cannot think about our own comfort when the best sons of Ukraine are dying.”

The same ethos is driving the current “explosion” of documentaries.

Since February 2022, TV News Channels in Ukraine have toed the official line and relied on stories in the name of unity. But independent filmmakers are zooming in on the difficulty.

“People who want to know the truth, they go to the cinema,” Olha Birzul.

He said the paper was “born on the Maidan”, Shorthand for the mass protests in 2014 that later ousted a pro-Russia president from power.

When people occupied Kyiv’s main square in 2014, that would-be movie started recording everything. “So when the full invasion happened, they were ready.”

Finally, the films they make today are heroic tales: the enemy and the cause are clear. But they also reveal the greatest realities of this war and its true cost.

Olha’s own husband was killed in 2022 and, for her, such films are a way to record the sacrifice of Ukrainians and honor their memory.

“It’s a form of justice,” he said.

“We want to watch other movies – maybe some comedies or some dramas,” is how one filmgoer, Natalia, put it as she exited a screening of Cuba and Alaska.

“Of course I don’t want to watch the movies, but I have to, like everyone else. Because this is our history and this is now.”