Porcelain War is the story of artists who craft beautiful objects out of porcelain amidst the chaos and destruction of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is a documentary that uniquely captures the fragility of this moment, juxtaposing the dual lives of these artists. Since its premiere at Sundance last year, Porcelain War has been a successful documentary. It has received rave reviews, been nominated, and won several awards, including the DGA and Sundance Grand Jury awards. Co-director and editor Brendan Bellomo recently spoke with Immersive via Zoom.
[This conversation has been edited for clarity and length]
How did you get involved with this project?
My wife, Aniela Sidorska, grew up under Russian oppression in communist Poland. She was a political refugee until she escaped with her parents to the United States about years ago. She discovered Anya Stasenko and Slava Leontyev’s figurines online. She was looking for international artists to collaborate with, and she was blown away by their work.
There is such incredible energy contained inside these figurines. They’re only a few centimeters tall, and they have these enormous stories to tell. We just couldn’t believe it. So, the four of us started an animation project together, and before we could dive in, Russia invaded Ukraine.
How did this lead to the film project?
We called Slava to see if they were okay. We assumed they would leave, but they didn’t. They decided to fight during the day and make art at night. He wasn’t just fighting; he was also involved in training fellow citizens to fight. It was completely unfathomable because he’s such a peaceful, creative person. It seemed like a compelling subject for a film.
How did you decide to include animation?
I love the notion of combining animation and live-action. When I went to film school, I was told you gotta pick one or the other. I think these styles belong together. Porcelain War is such an amalgamation of different modes of cinema. It is very pure Cinema Vérité, combined with animation.
These worlds couldn’t be more opposite – art and war…
Slava’s commander is a professor at their state university. His subject is modern Russian warfare. When Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, he went to his friends and said, “A big war is coming, and we need to be prepared.” So, as peaceful people, they didn’t want to fight, but they knew that they couldn’t run away.
There are so many levels of existential crisis. The choice that they made was to be proactive, to resist, and also to continue their art, to hold onto their humanity. It’s a juxtaposition that exists within their lives. It held up the most precise mirror possible to the reality of peaceful people who fight and then go home at night and make something beautiful.
Was it daunting having your crew in a war zone? What was your mental prep and the reality of the danger?
That’s a fundamental question. At the beginning of the process, we sent one camera to Slava and Andrey Stefanov, who would become our cinematographer. Andrey is an oil painter who had never used a camera before. We worked with an interpreter and taught him how to transfer his instincts as an artist to this new medium.
We ended up not going. We discussed as a team and realized this is the ultimate opportunity for them to tell the story through their eyes, in their truth, in their own words.
Did he shoot the whole movie? Or did you have multiple photographers?
Andrey shot the majority of the footage, with Slava also operating a camera. We had three compact cinema cameras that they would use. We sent 15 more cameras, body cameras, and additional drones to Slava’s unit, resulting in around nine different camera operators.
What kind of cameras did you use?
Blackmagic Pocket 4K Cinema Camera is very capable because it can shoot super low compression. If you really know how to work with it in post, it has great integrity to the image because the bit rate is really high. In that regard, it’s really able to outperform a lot of more expensive cameras. It’s compact and easy to use. It was a perfect fit for them. We had a hundred terabytes of raw footage.
What did that workflow look like? Did they send you stuff virtually, or did you have to FedEx it back and forth?
It was very complicated to set up. We knew we needed to protect them and the footage because they risked their lives to share what they were going through. What they captured has high tactical value within a specific time frame.
We worked with former homeland security experts, cryptography experts, and IT experts to create this encrypted pipeline through which the footage could come to us. The second aspect of it was that anything we used in the film would be 90 days behind their missions.
What did that look like on your end in terms of the edit? Were you working on this 9-5? Was there thousands of hours of footage?
The workflow was around the clock, and it ended up being much more involved than anybody expected. This became an international collaboration of artists. We were cutting here. We’re in co-production with Songbird Studios in Sydney, Australia, who are amazing. They’re running assistant editorial assembly editors. We had sound design there, color, visual effects, translations, and a big post-production infrastructure.
How long did all of this take?
They shot over 500 hours of footage, which we edited while simultaneously doing post-production sound and animation. We edit seven days a week. The animation took a year. We wanted to see their past in Crimea. We needed to go into the first days of the war in a very personal, subjective way. We needed to share their dreams of a peaceful future in Ukraine. We brought that out in the animation.
Tell me about the approach to the sound… Sound is essential for documentaries…
Slava and Andrey created a massive sound library. We sent a lot of audio recording equipment, so they captured the ambiance of shelling, bird calls, little creeks, and beautiful stuff. And so that’s the platform to emotionally relate to what’s happening. Often, it couldn’t be visual. It had to be sonic. The approach to sound in this movie was very reverent and specific.
We worked with a team in Australia, RMS Sound. Robert Mackenzie was the supervising sound editor, and Sam Hayward was doing our rerecording mix. They’re just masters. They used this library that was captured to create this totally authentic soundscape and then brought that into surround sound to really arrive at the feeling of what it’s like to be in a European city that’s being actively shelled. Sound contains so much more emotion than an image. It’s easy to disconnect from an image.
What has this experience been like?
We just hit the three-year anniversary of the invasion, and there is no end in sight. It’s the largest conflict in Europe since World War II. I think sharing something hopeful and continuing to create art is a beacon for everybody. Democracy is at risk around the world now more than ever. The journey continues, and we are hoping to continue sharing the story as widely as we can.
Further info about Porcelain War can be found here.
