A cinematic plea for peace in Ukraine

The war in Ukraine, now in its sixth month, has been intensively covered and exhaustively analyzed by the world’s media. Also, thousands of raw images from the conflict have appeared on social media.

Slovakian photographer and documentary filmmaker Juraj Mravec Jr. was early on the scene, gathering firsthand stories from both combatants and victims in his 2016 documentary “Peace to You All,” which covers the conflict in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region that broke out in the wake of the 2014 Euro-Maidan Revolution. In Mravec’s film, which opens at the Eurospace cinema in Shibuya on Aug. 6., his interviewees emerge as distinct individuals, expressing a range of opinions and emotions, from anger to anguish.

During a video interview with The Japan Times in May, Mravec says he initially had larger ambitions than documenting the conflict between Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian military in the Donbas.

“My father is a journalist and, when I was 13 or 14 years old, he did a book project about seven world-famous war photographers,” the director says. “Reading it, I was completely amazed. I told myself ‘This is what I want to do — be a photographer and travel and meet people.’”

In Prague in 2001, Mravec went to an exhibition by Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Suau, one of the photographers featured in his father’s book. When he saw Suau’s photos, which were themed on the countries of the former Soviet Union, he found a destination for fulfilling his ambition. “I thought, ‘This is so cool, I want to go there.’” After earning money for expenses, he traveled all around Russia.

But when the Euro-Maidan Revolution erupted in Ukraine to depose a corrupt pro-Russian leader, Mravec decided not to film in all the post-Soviet countries.

“I thought that if I do not shoot an important event like this, my previous work is for nothing,” he says. “That's why I decided to go to Kyiv and cover the Euro-Maidan as a photographer.”

In the spring of 2015, Mravec went to photograph and film the unfolding conflict in the Donbas. His father, Juraj Mravec Sr., served as his cameraman.

“My father told me that because of his war experience — he was in Yugoslavia a lot, also in Iraq when Saddam Hussein fell — he would go with me,” he explains. “My father and I have a very good relationship — he's more like my friend than a strict father. So I said, ‘OK, let's go together.’”

The resulting film is a mix of Mravec’s stark black-and-white photographs and live footage of the same subjects, with Mravec acting as the interviewer and his father filming. Together, they covered both sides of the conflict, moving back and forth between Ukraine and the separatist Donetsk People's Republic.

“That was possible in 2015,” Mravek says. “The Russian separatists, as the representatives from this new country, wanted journalists to write about them — even the bad things. They wanted to be known in the world.” But after 2016, he adds, they stopped being so accommodating after realizing that letting in foreign journalists would only generate negative PR.

The Ukrainians, on the other hand, were happy to let Mravec and other journalists cross the border. “They wanted us to write about the separatist regions because they knew they were f—ked up, that nothing good was there,” he says.

Mravek was not a propagandist for one side in particular, however. In the film, a burly miner tells Mravec that Ukrainian soldiers interrogated and beat him for a week, suspecting him of working for the Donetsk People's Republic. After being threatened with 15 years in prison, he was finally released.

He also speaks to a man in the Donbas who describes himself as a Christian believer who is against killing. “I have friends in Ukraine,” the man says. “I have friends and family here, as well as in Russia. And my children live in Kyiv. How can I fight against my own children?”

In a town that had recently been a war zone, Mravec finds a distraught elderly woman wandering amid the ruins. “I lived in Ukraine and everything was good,” she tells him. “And now what? Everything is destroyed, nothing remains, just graves and crosses.” Dropping his pose as interviewer, Mravec says, “I am sorry for the questions. Can I give you a hug?” And he does.

At the time of our interview, Mravec says he has been back to Ukraine three times since the start of the most recent war. “I was there from the first day,” he says. “Altogether, I was there for two months.”

The war, which he described as “frozen” when he visited the Donbas front in 2015 (“I didn't experience my life being in real danger”), was hot indeed when he was in Ukraine this year.

“The strong artillery, the fighting, all that is happening in the Donbas,” he says. “The people living there are so poor and so unlucky. They’ve had this war for eight years now, with the economy going down very fast. So there is nothing, only garbage, bad roads and poor people.”

A return to the separatist region he had filmed in 2015 was impossible. On March 22, however, Mravec got a call from a priest whose church appears at the end of “Peace to You All” and whose worshipers’ prayers for peace give the film its title.

“He was doing evacuations from the city of Volnovakha, which is now under Russian control and doesn’t exist anymore — they destroyed everything,” Mravec says. ”He asked me if I could help him with a bulletproof vest and helmet.”

Mravec was able to source both in the nearby town of Marinka. “Maybe a week later he was calling me,” the director says. “He told me, ‘I'm so thankful for your help because today my bulletproof vest was hit by Russian soldiers during an evacuation. If you hadn’t found it for me, I would be dead now.’”

At the time of the interview, Mravec was planning to return to Ukraine in the fall, but not as a neutral observer covering both sides.

“I can't be neutral, right?” he says. “If your head is working well, you just have to see this was Russian aggression.” Also, he notes, the days when reportage from a war’s frontline took weeks to appear in the media are over. “Now it takes a few seconds. So it’s obvious to one side that we are spies for the other.” The side he always chooses, he adds, is “the one where there’s democracy.”

“This is the most important thing for me, I'm protecting democracy,” he says.

Will there be peace and reconciliation, as the worshipers in the film so devoutly pray for? “A soldier who was the commander of a battalion and a very smart guy told me that of course one day we and the separatists will be friends,” he says. “Also, Russia will be friends with Ukraine again. It could take 50 or 60 years. Generations will have to change. And Russia will have to lose its imperialist taste for taking over other countries. I hope that happens, but it won’t be so soon, I’m pretty sure.”

“Peace to You All” will begin screening at Eurospace in Shibuya, Tokyo, from Aug. 6. For more details, visit https://peacetoyouall.com (Japanese only).