Cannes Review: Maksym Nakonechnyi’s ‘Butterfly Vision’

Arguably the most timely film in Cannes this year, Butterfly Vision will also likely remain one of the least seen, in that it exists overwhelmingly as a marker of a very specific time and place rather than as anything many people might actually choose to watch. Presented in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, this somber and sobering document about Ukraine appears to mix verité-style dramatized scenes with television and other visual material that is never less than tremendously grim. How and by whom it might be shown in the territories where viewers would most appreciate it is unclear; depressing hardly begins to describe it.

Young local filmmaker Maksym Nakonechnyi has been very resourceful in gathering footage that starkly and upsettingly reveals the trauma of recent times; the images are of ruin and disfunction as well as of life continuing in its own fashion.

The central figure is a young aerial reconnaissance officer named Lilia (Rita Burkovska) who has just spent several months in prison in Donbass. Startlingly, she has been scarred on her upper back. She is also pregnant, which serves as an obvious symbol of Lilia’s — and Ukraine’s — determination to keep struggling and establish hope for a fresh future.

Lilia is a grim, serious, no-nonsense woman you respect from the get-go, one who has the will and grit that will be required for the region’s people to survive with their own identity and homeland intact. It’s another very difficult period for a region with a rough history, and the film’s relevance to what’s going on there now is clearly the driving reason for its existence.

One must be honest: This is a tough sit, a veritable parade of misfortune, sorrowful history, nasty deeds, needless suffering and death. The packed house at the Cannes premiere sat in acute quiet as misfortune piled upon misfortune and video footage displayed atrocities the likes of which people in all of prior history were never in a position to behold first-hand.

The director has used all sorts of footage — archival and newly created — along with the obvious symbol of Lilia’s baby to represent a potential different future for the region. All the same, Lilia still has to work strenuously to create any kind of hope that a better life might lie down the road. She provides the through-line that defines the determination that will be required to potentially make a difference in the long run.

There’s no subtlety or ambiguity in this picture, but it does offer images that haven’t been seen before and, no doubt, will be useful to inspire audiences in all relevant territories to further action and hope.