Educational Media Reviews Online

This short film is broken into a series of eight vignettes that focus on individual stories of how Ukrainians are grappling with the war and supporting the war effort. The first vignette opens with soldiers at the front reading letters and reacting to how letters from home are meaningful. Following this, there are sections on pet rescue, clothing manufacturing, logistics, food preparation for troops, an artist, and a playwright. The film concludes with a brief section featuring an international trainer talking about developing the volunteer soldiers. There is no overarching introduction or conclusion, just the stories.

Given how this film was shot, one can approach it from looking at the film in its totality or at the separate parts. On the whole, the film serves as a way to demonstrate how Ukrainians are fully behind supporting the war from all facets of life. The film uses the experiences of the soldiers to bookend the film. The vignettes are all well filmed and on this broad level it is satisfactory. Unfortunately, the film and individual vignettes are too short for much depth beyond this general support. One person does comment that the war “showed people’s true colors” but that is never explored and would seem to go beyond what this film desires to show.

The individual sections could be useful for discussions in classes about war in general. In the face of an invasion, how do individuals away from the front as the war continues make sense of day-to-day life. What changes are made, and how do they respond? In particular, the section “Style to Service” would work well for discussions about economics in war, and how that changes people’s livelihood. “Pet Rescue Network” is also a vignette that would serve for discussions on the impact of war, and how lives are changed. Given the brevity of these sections, not all of them work as well for this approach.

Overall, this is a snapshot of how Ukrainians are attempting to support the war and their country in multiple ways.

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