IN MAY 2021, members of the Toronto Film Critics Association (TFCA) received an invitation from the organizers of the Kyiv Critics Week for a cultural exchange: We would provide a list of Canadian films from which they would pick three, and we in turn would select three Ukrainian works from a shortlist. We were introduced to our colleagues on the other side of the world via a virtual visit to Ukraine.
The film I chose to discuss in our meeting with the Ukrainians was Rhino (2021), a dark, provocative, brutally bleak drama about a gangster’s rise and eventual fall. The backstory was as fascinating as the film. Director Oleh Sentsov had been arrested in 2014 while protesting in Crimea under spurious charges of “plotting terrorist attacks.” Upon his release, he set his sights on telling this morally ambiguous tale of the so-called “wild ’90s” of post-Soviet Ukraine, where previously sacrosanct rules ceased to matter and animalistic toughness was required to survive.
The film’s lead, Serhii Filimonov, was a veteran of the mid-decade war and a leader in the Azov group, a far-right paramilitary organization that borrows iconography and ideology from dark sources. Some people consider it a neo-Nazi movement. This element complicated the film’s perception, particularly for those outside Ukraine, and while the film premiered at Venice, no major North American festivals programmed this provocative and remarkable tale, even those that campaigned for Sentsov’s release from prison.
Our virtual Q&A was in fall 2021. The shadow of Crimea’s annexation, Sentsov’s prior arrest, Filimonov’s past, and the continued unrest in the Donbas were very much in mind. Despite the slight lag in our conversation and the discomfiting vision illustrates the chaos after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a dark period that continues to fuel Russian narratives about contemporary Ukraine. This makes the moral ambiguities of Sentsov’s film that much more subtle, and perhaps difficult to navigate for those unfamiliar with the competing narratives. While we could not know how the brutal violence of the film would foreshadow what was soon to come, it was impossible for me not to think of Sentsov’s drama when the chaos and brutality escalated dramatically in the region mere months later.
