It is Ukraine in the future—2025. A retired soldier volunteers to help in the search for the bodies of those who died in the war between the country and Russia. He meets a volunteer and together—and with us all—they count the bodies exhumed from the ground. There are mines all over the landscape that is as bleak and unforgiving as the enterprise itself—that of recovering bodies, tabulating the find, and identifying the contusions, broken bones and other violent acts committed upon them. There are skeletons, a better option; there are mutilated human corpus with flesh still clinging upon them. Then there are the volunteers throwing up every now and then at the sight and smell of what are really carcasses. The other volunteers work methodically: their daily exposure to death—and the causes of death—making them expert, objective and unfeeling about the task at hand.
The cataloging of the victims (or aggressors) of war is interrupted by road travel, memories and moments of intimacies. Then it is back to the tallying. When this reckoning takes place, time stands still, as if death takes over what is left of life.
If death has a scent and a look, then this film Atlantis succeeds to make us sense the absence of life in all its physical aspect.
Directed by Valentyn Vasyanovych, the film looks at the outset like an action film. But the monotone of the landscape and the distance from the event bring with it the feel of a documentary. The repetitive accounting of dead bodies is detached. We are left to watch it as the documentation continues.
The film tells us the event (in the future) happens a year after the Ukrainians have defeated the Russian forces in that region. Sergiy is a former soldier working in a smelter company. When work stopped in that company, he leaves for Eastern Ukraine to work as a volunteer. He is suffering from PTSD. The job of being there in the area where all the killings take place seems to be his attempt to cope with the inner depression. It is a disturbing job. It is as if one has returned to the scene of the “crime.”
But is war a crime?
When the film was screened in competition at the recently completed 32nd Tokyo International Film Festival, I had the opportunity to attend the event. In the post-screening Q&A, the Japanese moderator stressed that the questions should just be about (italics mine) the film. Indeed, the film talks about an event that is ongoing. Depending on which side you are, the conflict between the two countries is summed by the label, “Russo-Ukrainian War.” It is also described as a military action of Russia in Crimea and in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine.
By situating the film in the near future, Vasyanovych transforms what could have been a very specific anti-war material into a depoliticized manifesto. The effect is not only an assumption of a detached perspective, common in regular documentaries, but also a freedom to look at how human actors can survive or try to get out of the pit of wars. There is almost a poetic, romantic sensibility in Sergiy alone in the grim landscape. There is also a predictability in Sergiy finding comfort in Katya, the other volunteer in the odd mission to encode annihilation.
All these observations do not diminish the power of the film. Far from it. Original and trenchant, Atlantis becomes a general indictment of war. When our task is to take account of those who die and we do the job with efficiency, then we have become one with the technologies of war.
Described as “apocalyptic” and “dystopian,” Atlantis terrifies because the apocalypse is here with us already and the dystopian societies are not far behind.
Toward the end of the film, Sergiy and Katya engage in frenzied lovemaking. In a fantastic cinematic scheme, the images of the two are captured in negatives. The effect stops the narrative and allows us to contemplate on what has happened to the two human beings. Then the door of the van where Sergiy and Katya have kept themselves opens to a vast, empty horizon. The sky is gray and dirty white. Black birds fly and the film ends.
During the post-screening press conference in Tokyo, the actor who portrayed Sergiy was introduced to the audience. He was Andriy Rymaruk, a real soldier in the Russo-Ukrainian War. He confessed that he knew what it was to have post-traumatic stress disorder. With his status adding verismo to the cinema, the actor was asked whether the film and its realism subjected him again to the trauma. Atlantis is the first film for Andriy Rymaruk who, according to the director, has been getting offers to act in more films.
Atlantis won the Best Film in the Horizons Section (Orizzonti) in the 76th Venice Film Festival. The section is considered by many as the equivalent of the Un Certain Regard of Cannes Film Festival. The award is given to new films that could be seen “in the horizon.”
The Orizzonti prize was also won by Pepe Diokno for Engkwentro in 2009 and Lav Diaz for Melancholia in 2008.
Atlantis was given the Special Jury Prize in the 32nd Tokyo International Film Festival.
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