From the start, Slava Leontyev and I, as co-directors of the documentary feature Porcelain War, realized that we had a problem. Actually, a few. Big ones.
To begin with, there was this: Slava is a porcelain artist turned Special Forces soldier in Ukraine, I am a VFX supervisor in the U.S., and neither of us had ever directed a documentary before.
We had emailed for a few years about collaborating on an animated film, but we weren’t yet partners. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and we began thinking about making a different project.
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But we were separated by 6,000 miles, a language barrier and the largest conflict in Europe since World War II. We had never met in person and maybe never would. Our first Zoom was filled with sounds of nearby Russian shelling and a translator struggling to keep up with two people who didn’t speak the same language trying to make a film in a war zone. In our very first Zoom, Slava said: “All war is ugly; it all looks the same. The destruction. The smoke. The bodies. We’ve seen all this in other films. What we should show is the beauty of our country — everything that we are fighting to defend.”
There was no reliable way to ship cameras from the U.S. into Ukraine. Luckily, we discovered a paramilitary supply chain of volunteers who were up to the task of getting equipment into Slava’s hands. It was a makeup artist from New Jersey who led the charge, moving 50 bags of life-saving medical and military aid out of her small apartment into Poland and across the border of Ukraine. She found room in her bags for our gear, and it ultimately found its way to Slava’s flat in Kharkiv, about 20 miles from the front line.
How were we going to show Ukraine through the eyes of civilians living through this war? We needed to share a humanized, personal perspective. But how do you teach someone to use such complex equipment remotely?
For every camera, lens and microphone that Slava received in Ukraine, I had the same piece of equipment in Los Angeles, and we set up an impromptu film school. This way, Slava and our cinematographer, Andrey Stefanov — an oil painter who had never used a professional-grade camera — learned how to translate their artistic instincts into cinema. Composition, lighting, color — these were all things we all understood. The camera was just a new tool.
We also took to sharing drawings, sketches, photography and paintings to communicate with one another. We discovered we loved many of the same films, authors and music. We shared everything, and we immediately understood each other.
Ideally, on a film, you shoot, then edit, and then do postproduction — but we didn’t have that luxury. What is happening in Ukraine is urgent. It affects millions of innocent people and has implications for countries around the world. We wanted to move quickly to share this story, so we decided to shoot and edit simultaneously.
Every day, Slava and I would collaborate on Zoom as co-directors. We worked together with a team spread across four continents and many time zones. For example, in Australia, translations, editing and postproduction were happening around the clock. And in Poland, a collection of artists worked tirelessly on three animated sequences, featuring 7,000 frames of hand-drawn animation, to bring to life the art created by Slava and his wife, Anya, in order to depict their idyllic past, harrowing present and hopeful future. And in Ukraine, our team captured more than 500 hours of footage on 15 cameras.
After 21 months of working remotely, we learned that Porcelain War was accepted into the Sundance Film Festival. We were overjoyed that this story would be shared with the world — and thrilled that we would finally get to see each other face-to-face, as Slava, Anya, their dog Frodo, Andrey and his family were granted special visas to attend the festival.
When they stepped off the plane in Salt Lake City the night before the Sundance premiere, we looked at each other, in person, for the very first time, and we all hugged and cried.
We had made an entire film together without ever having met. The next day, an audience in Park City saw Slava, Anya and Andrey’s lives on the big screen and gave the film an eight-minute standing ovation, a moving show of warmth, love and recognition for not only Ukraine, but for the art that these Ukrainian visitors had brought to the world. A few days later, we were honored to receive the fest’s U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize. And, on March 2, we will all reconvene in the heart of Hollywood to attend the Oscars as nominees for best documentary feature. It’s all a little surreal, to say the least.
This story first appeared in a February stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
