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The Ukrainian film Porcelain War, about artists defiantly at work during a time of war, has been nominated for an Academy Award in the best feature documentary category for the 2025 Oscars.
Directors Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev’s documentary achieves a disturbing intimacy with beauty as it follows the artists Anya Stasenko and co-director Leontyev in Kharkiv, near to the Russian-Ukrainian border. There they find inspiration to create porcelain figurines as their country is invaded and they face constant shelling and destruction around themselves.
As Stasenko and Leontyev make their art, they place the porcelain figures amid the rubble of the ongoing war, while Leontyev also serves as a weapons instructor for a military squad of civilians taking up arms against the invading Russians.
Porcelain Wars, from Picturehouse, earlier won the top award in the U.S. Documentary Competition at Sundance in 2024. The documentary has also played widely on the international film festival circuit.
Another Ukrainian documentary, 20 Days in Mariupol, won best documentary at the 2024 Oscars, as director Mstyslav Chernov celebrated the first Academy Awards win for his country.
“The responsibility of the artist to continue to produce art in the darkest moments and the capacity of art to add beauty and levity in that darkness are just a few of the undercurrents in Porcelain War,” The Hollywood Reporter critic Daniel Feinberg said in his review of the documentary.
U.S.-based Bellomo also wrote and edited the award-winning documentary, while Ukraine-based Leontyev is a first-time director and longtime artist as he participated in the project.
Porcelain War will face competition in the best documentary feature category from Black Box Diaries, Shiori Itō, No Other Land, Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat and Sugarcane.
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