The documentary of the Lithuanian director, killed during the fights, was co -elderly with Hanna Bilobrova and finished after his death.
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What about the images discovered in Mariupolis 2, seized in the daily life of Ukrainian civilians, when you know that the one who holds the camera died, in early April (the 2 probably), under the bombing in Marioupol, while he was trying to leave the port city? Lithuanian director Mantas Kvedaravicius, born in 1976, author of Barzakh (2011), Mariupolis (2016) and Parthenon (2019), returned to Ukraine in 2022, in Donbass, to find people he had filmed between 2014 and 2015. He did not have time to finish his film, and his posthumous documentary, Mariupolis 2, co -breaded with Hanna Bilobrova, is presented in special session in Cannes.
The filmmaker, who studied anthropology, favors the point of view of the observer. His camera is placed on the side of life, survivors and daily life reduced to the most basic. Find wood, under the rubble of the house next door, light a fire in the courtyard, boil the pot, thank God, for those who believe in it, for having spared them terrible bombings of the day before.
Most of the film is shot in a Christian church, evangelical, which serves as shelter for twenty people. Outside, a small group discusses. The latest news, things to do, and always the background noise of explosions. “At least, the weather is nice,” said someone. But the blue sky is crossed with gray fumes and that does not bode well. The looks are stretched, but we still joke about the need to choose your moment to go out pee. Then the shell intensifies, the camera trembles. Back in the building. A man runs with a still warm missile debris. “He did not go far.” Another, later: “We are going to die or what?”
Pudique camera
Two men are already dead, in a neighboring home. You have to move the bodies if you want to recover the generator. Two residents hit it, and tinker. The machine is heavy, you have to install a wheel to pull it, and above all you should not drag. By organizing ourselves to survive, we take the risk of dying under a bomb. Terrifying sequence that seems to last eternity.
But the camera remains modest and does not come to smell the misfortune. Mantas Kvedaravicius is interested in people’s words, the one who begins to untie after the amazement. “I worked thirty-two years old, I lost my house, and now I am poor,” sums up this man who shows the crater of “10 meters by 20” formed by the explosion. Another lists the Ukrainian leaders who have followed one another, and notes this paradox: “The more the government is honest, the more shit is.” In mid-March: in the great kitsch room of the church, with colonnades and False ceiling, a woman announces: “Marioupol’s theater collapsed.”
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