Cannes Film Festival 2025: With "Militantropos," three directors create a collective and intimate portrait of Ukraine at war

It is in times of crisis, when individualism becomes an unbearable luxury, that cinema rediscovers the virtues of the collective. Thus, it was as a group, more precisely as a group of three, that young Ukrainian documentarians made Militantropos , presented at the Quinzaine des cinéastes in Cannes, a gripping chronicle of the country under the influence of the Russian invasion as it had never been seen before on screen. Yelizaveta Smith, Alina Gorlova and Simon Mozgovyi, arriving on the Croisette as if in an alternative reality, sacrificed as little as possible to the glitzy atmosphere, to remain focused and precise in the interview, taking turns with each other, as if speaking with one voice.

They come respectively from Odessa, Zaporozhye, and Kharkiv, " cities that are now hard hit." Yelizaveta and Alina met at film school. In 2013, just before the "revolution of dignity" in Kyiv's Maidan Square, they founded their own organization to work independently, which Simon later joined. " At first, we thought we would focus on fiction, but the revolution changed our perspective. We turned to documentaries ," Alina Gorlova explains. "When the large-scale invasion began, it seemed natural for us to come together as a collective voice, the voice of our generation . "

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