THE STORY – A documentary following the everyday lives of people living through the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
THE CAST – N/A
THE TEAM – Yelizaveta Smith, Alina Gorlova, Simon Mosgovi (Director/Writer) & Maksym Nakonechnyi (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 111 Minutes
Premiering in the Quinzaine des Cineastes section of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, this powerful documentary is co-directed by Yelizaveta Smith, Alina Gorlova, and Simon Mosgovyi, who form part of the Tabor collective of Ukrainian filmmakers. The first film in a planned triptych of documentaries, collectively called “The Days I Would Like to Forget,” “Milantropos” follows the everyday lives of people living through the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The film opens with a handy explanation of its title; ‘Militantropos’ refers to the Latin word for soldier (‘milit’) and the Greek word for human (‘antropos’), meaning a persona adopted by people when entering a state of war. Structurally, the film is nominally divided into three chapters, each of which begins with a similar caption, a subsequent heading offers the bleak statement that “War is the one and only option to exist.”
Filmed between February 24, 2022, and the end of August 2024, “Milantropos” opens with an arresting image of a grey, cloudy sky slowly merging into the thick black smoke of a huge fire. That clash between nature and war is a recurring theme throughout the film, illustrating how nature is permanent, adapting, and enduring even in a state of war.
There is very little in the way of narrative or recurring characters throughout the film. The exception is a small boy, who’s first glimpsed observing a group of people singing in church. He later reappears, sobbing, at a funeral for a soldier named Denys, presumably the boy’s father. This is a deceptively simple device – the film’s single moment of character recognition for the audience, immediately followed by devastating emotion – and it pays off to a powerfully moving effect.
The rest of the film consists of fly-on-the-wall observational sequences as various military and civilian people go about their daily lives. As indicated in the film’s title, the two groups blur, and an early shot of civilians receiving weapons training perfectly illustrates this.
However, rather than suggesting that war is turning ordinary people into soldiers, the film is careful to also present the soldiers themselves as ordinary people. To that end, the soldiers are never seen in combat. Instead, we see them collectively watching a football game or patiently waiting for transport at what looks like a bus stop, with one man petting a scene-stealing stray dog as they wait.
Throughout the film, the directors present powerful, unforgettable images that illustrate the horrific, day-to-day reality of life during wartime. One sequence involves dozens of coffins made of wooden crates being buried in a makeshift graveyard. The sequence ends with a long shot of a man crying, presumably the man responsible for digging the graves, given his proximity to a digging machine.
Similarly, the film relates deeply traumatic stories matter-of-factly, and they hit all the harder for not being sensationalized. One particular example involves a story heard on a TV broadcast about 300 people who were kept prisoner in a school basement for months, only to find their homes destroyed when they were set free, so they returned to the basement that had become their home.
That thematic story of human beings adapting to their new reality is reflected in several of the film’s key moments, whether it’s workers clearing up the wreckage of destroyed homes, a group of children playing on a collapsed bridge, or a man casually mowing his lawn with a massive, unexploded missile shell in the foreground of the shot.
Occasionally, just occasionally, there are funny moments, such as a pair of macho youths aggressively punching tanks as they walk past them. The highlight in that regard involves a man with what is quite possibly the hairiest neck ever seen on film and his very stubborn goat, Martha, who gives the filmmakers a gift of a scene by refusing to cross a road on command.
On a similar note, the filmmakers also find precious moments of beauty, most notably an achingly moving sequence involving a little girl eating strawberries, evocatively shot by the film’s cinematographers, Khrystyna Lizogub, Denys Melnyk, and Vyacheslav Tsvetkov. There are also more overt moments of hope, as illustrated by a shot of workers restoring electricity power lines.
However, the spectre of war is always there in the background, as illustrated by a closing sequence that observes a young couple’s wedding, only to reveal that the groom is a new recruit and will almost immediately be going off to fight in the war. That sequence also involves what is perhaps an ill-advised slip-up on the part of the directors and editors because the bride somewhat ill-advisedly gives out her entire phone number on camera.
In short, this is a powerfully moving and beautifully shot documentary that achieves the filmmakers’ stated aim of constructing a narrative out of collective trauma and finding humanity in the darkest moments while also bearing witness to the horrific tragedy of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
