Christopher Vourlias On the eve of the 79th Venice Film Festival, where his powerful Ukraine war documentary “Freedom on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom” will premiere out of competition on Sept.
7, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky was in a frantic race against time. Footage was still being shot in Ukraine into the second week of August, with Afineevsky only completing the film on Aug.
31 — the same day that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the A-list celebrities and foreign press at the festival’s opening ceremony, urging the world not to forget the war in Ukraine with the impassioned plea: “Don’t turn your back to us.” While Hollywood stars like Julianne Moore, Adam Driver and Tessa Thompson have lit up the red carpet in Venice and Timothée Chalamet has sparked Chala-mania on the Lido, Afineevsky has been working ‘round-the-clock to make sure the world is still watching Ukraine. “It’s important not to avoid the fact that the war is still there,” the director tells Variety. “It’s important to use our ability as filmmakers who are coming from Hollywood to give a spotlight to these stories, when the world is seeing them less on their TV screens.” The Israeli-American filmmaker was nominated for an Academy Award for his 2015 documentary “Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom,” a riveting, verité-style portrait of the mass demonstrations in Kyiv’s Maidan Square that ousted the pro-Russian, authoritarian President Viktor Yanukovych in the winter of 2014.
His latest film, which functions as a companion piece, not only chronicles the current war with harrowing survivors’ accounts and graphic footage, but demonstrates how the events of that winter — which prompted Russian President
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