KYiv was supposed to fall in three days. That’s what commentators and experts in the media said rather disparagingly before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. They thought the fight would be quick and decisive, but instead the Ukrainian resistance held out. Never mind, three days. The war is now approaching three years.
“What is this nation?” asks David Gutnik, a Brooklyn-born filmmaker of Ukrainian descent. “What is this people? What is this identity?”
He asks rhetorical questions raised by the war and describes the surprise when a country and its people, so quickly dismissed, held their ground. If the world believed Ukraine would fall so quickly, it was probably because it had no idea who the Ukrainian people were. Gutnik’s deeply moving documentary Rule of Two Walls seeks to change that.
The film is about Ukrainians on the front lines; not the soldiers, mind you, but the artists who stand firm against the ash and rubble in their homeland. They are painters and singers, holding exhibitions and shows, despite the constant gunfire and artillery shelling that is an inevitable part of art. They are fighting to create and protect their culture and thus their Ukrainian identity, in response to Vladimir Putin’s repeated claims that they have none.
“This is a war of grenades, rockets and drones,” Gutnik says in a Zoom conversation from his home in New York. “But it is also a war of identity, a war of memory, a war about who gets to write history. Should the colonizer get to write it or should it be the people who want state, nation and dignity?”
The artists of collective resistance in Rule of Two Walls include Bogdana Davydiuk, whose haunting, Dadaist street murals and mosaics reflect the fiery passion and disorientation of war; rapper Stepan Burban, aka Palindrom, who spits angry rhymes in the face of Russian aggression; and Kinder Album, an anonymous artist whose childlike drawings depict naked bodies that seem deeply vulnerable in the face of war’s inhumanity. Voiceover features the anonymous artist reciting the film’s title. The “rule of two walls,” she says, means finding a corridor when there isn’t enough time to seek shelter from a bombardment.
The filmmakers themselves – including Gutnik, his cinematographer, producer, composer and sound engineer, all of whom appear in front of the camera – become part of this resistance. They are artists too, after all. They are making a film that experiments with disembodied voices and other destabilizing techniques to capture the experience of war’s displacement as best as possible. Rule of Two Walls achieves a certain haunting poetry as it becomes an extension of its subject, giving the filmmakers space to share what they experience and how they process the trauma.
Gutnik originally wanted to make a film about Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war, a film that would reflect his own broken connection to his homeland. His family fled the area shortly before he was born. They were part of a diaspora that could barely speak Ukrainian, as much of the language and culture was suppressed when the country was part of the USSR. But now they feel a desire to reclaim their heritage, particularly in response to the war.
“All these Ukrainians in the diaspora have been living in a silent hornet’s nest,” says Gutnik. “And this war has shattered it. Now all these bees are buzzing all over the world, saying: ‘Wait, no! I’m Ukrainian! I’m here! They can’t tell us who we are.'”
Gutnik switched directors when he found an appealing anchor for his film in Lyana Mytsko. She is the director of the Lviv Municipal Art Center, which served as a refuge during the war, but also as a place to create and process. He reads a quote from Mytsko that caught his eye. She says artists cannot take up arms, but each one is “a weapon of Ukrainian culture.”
When Gutnik contacted Mytsko in 2022, she was in the process of dismantling the old Soviet walls at the art center and discovered pre-USSR murals deliberately hidden behind them. This act, Gutnik says, reflected what his film should focus on: “the reclaiming of our cultural identity and history, this kind of decolonization of ourselves and our consciousness.”
In Rule of Two Walls, Gutnik shows the creation and preservation of art, but also the war being waged against it. Theaters and museums are bombed as a strategic erasure of history and culture, familiar to any group that has faced genocide in the past or currently.
Indigenous cultures were stripped of their language and ceremonies. Nazis burned books and looted Jewish art. The Sri Lankan army set fire to the Jaffna library as the country finally committed genocide against the Tamils. In addition to the tens of thousands, mostly women and children, killed in Gaza in the past ten months, Unesco has documented at least 50 damaged cultural sites, including mosques and museums – although reports in January put the number at least four times higher.
“When someone wants to commit genocide, they say (these people) don’t exist,” says Gutnik, quoting historian Timothy Snyder as he explains the underlying goal behind the attack on culture. “So if they destroy these people, it’s not really genocide because they never existed.”
Gutnik continues: “Two days before the all-out war, Putin based his entire justification for invading Ukraine on the idea that Ukraine does not exist. Cultural space is a front line in this war. This misinformation, these misunderstandings about Ukrainian history are used as a weapon, and then this instrumentalization of history turns into genocide, which leads to people dying.”
Gutnik’s film doesn’t hold back when confronting this horror. The images of the charred and mutilated bodies that the people in his film constantly confront are there to see. He has heard some viewers express discomfort with this. Not showing it, however, Gutnik feels, would be a betrayal of the reality and subjectivity of the people in his film, whose families and communities are the ones who die.
Gutnik also noted that it was the war-untouched American audience that questioned his decision to show this very graphic horror film, not the Ukrainian one. “If you don’t have to see it, you can block it out,” he says, explaining an option that Americans have that Ukrainians don’t.
I believe there is a connection between those who do not want to see the horror and those who do not acknowledge genocide as it is happening – be it in Ukraine or in Gaza.
“If you don’t name it, if you don’t say it, if you don’t show it, then you don’t have to deal with it,” Gutnik says, before quoting Snyder again.
“When someone says the word ‘genocide,’ someone in the room rolls their eyes,” he says. “The reason we don’t like to call something genocide, the reason we psychologically do that with our eyes, is because when we admit that it’s happening, we admit complicity.”
“We admit that it is happening under our supervision. That’s why we don’t want to call it that.”
