Ukrainian film critic blogs at front
Drafted into war, writer shares his life in the trenches
ROZDOLIVKA, Ukraine — Before the war arrived at his doorstep, Anton Filatov, a Ukrainian film critic, said the most dangerous thing he ever carried was a fork.
“I had never touched a weapon,” he said. “I was against war. I ran as far as I could from it.”
But as with so many other Ukrainians, the fighting found him, and his life has become a real-life war movie. He is serving on the front lines of Ukraine’s war against Russian invaders, in some of the most contested, blood-soaked territory, caught in a theater he never imagined for himself.
In late August, he was stationed in an abandoned house in the village of Rozdolivka, in the warravaged Donbas region. This used to be a place where the gardens had grapevines crawling up trellises and the houses had roofs. Then the shelling began.
During one barrage, Filatov, 34, ducked into a bomb shelter, still wearing his owlish glasses. He is extremely nearsighted, minus 7, one of the many reasons his wife was shocked that he was drafted.
Even with the horrors he has to squint to see, and the daily grind of being a soldier, he hasn’t given up on his writing — quite the opposite. Ukraine’s war has become his new source for material as he delves into the fear, sorrow, rage and anxiety he is experiencing and tries to find meaning in the smallest things around him, such as the mice that scurry over him while he sleeps.
In a recent text message, he wrote: “Once, during one
of the heavy attacks, I sat in a dugout and watched the earth tremble. Chopped pine roots stuck out from the wall of our shelter. The sap of the tree flowed out of them. It shined like mercury and resembled tears. A few months later, I don’t remember how many explosions there were that evening or what weapons had been fired. But I clearly remember one image: how the earth wept with heavy, cold tears.”
War has always provoked remarkable writing, from the Iliad onward. Norman Mailer published “The Naked and the Dead” after serving in the Pacific in World War II as a young man just out of Harvard. Bao Ninh wrote perhaps the saddest, most agonizing account of the Vietnam War, which he narrowly survived as a North Vietnamese foot soldier, in “The Sorrow of War.”
Filatov’s blog posts on Facebook are a 21st-century version, and they have gained him an audience.
“The war opens his gifts even more,” said Alexandr Gusev, a veteran Ukrainian film critic who was an admirer of Filatov’s film writing before the fighting and has been following his wartime blogging ever since.
He writes in three languages — Ukrainian, Russian and English — and in the 2010s, when Ukraine’s film industry took off, so did Filatov’s career. He saw thousands of movies, wrote hundreds of reviews and traveled the world to sit on film festival juries.
“From the start, Anton was really noticeable,” Gusev said. “He has this ability to use his own personal emotional condition, which brings him close to his audience. He became one of the top five or six film critics in our country.”
With the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, cinemas in the country shut down and so did many Ukrainian publications. His wife, Elena Filatova, is also a journalist, and to help support his family, he became a content editor for Nestle, while still writing the occasional review.
Around 5:30 a.m. on Feb. 24, his young son Platon toddled up to a window in their apartment in the Kyiv suburbs and looked down at the street. Cars were fleeing, bomb blasts were shaking the city, and the little boy started crying. The Russians had invaded.
As required, Filatov reported for military duty, thinking he’d never be chosen, but a few weeks later, he boarded a train crowded with soldiers for Donbas, where the fighting has been the fiercest.
As a simple soldier, Filatov’s first task on the front was digging a pit to sleep
in. The rock-like soil was so hard he had to use an ax. It took an hour just to hack away a few inches. He didn’t like living in that hole.
But he didn’t stay long. At that stage of the fighting, he and his unit were being pushed back again and again, witnesses to the Ukrainian army’s struggles in Donbas this spring and summer. A voracious reader, Filatov writes about the overlap between the books he carries and the war itself.
In one blog post, he compared the underworld of a Jo Nesbo thriller, “Phantom,” to the suspicion and treachery in Donbas, where many residents support the Russian military and have worked secretly to aid them in their fight.
“The settlements here are full of traitors. They walk the streets like phantoms. Restless. Invisible. Dangerous.”
One night in Donbas, he saw something unusual in the starlit sky: glowing white embers, burning bright, floating gently down, almost like flowers. “It was very beautiful,” he said. “But horrible.”
It was white phosphorous, an especially dreaded munition that burns straight through anything. He started taking anti-anxiety drugs to function.
His life before the war now seems so far away.
“Quite everything that I loved, that I wanted, that I was interested in, has changed,” he said.
He used to gravitate toward art house films, but now says that one of his top 10 favorites is Christopher Nolan’s Hollywood blockbuster “Dunkirk,” about which he recently wrote:
“The leitmotif of this film is the hypnotizing sound of a ticking stopwatch. Here, at the front line, shelling is so intense that after every explosion, hearing disappears for tens of seconds. When the shelling stops, the hearing gradually begins to return. In one of these cases, the first thing I heard was the ticking of a clock. Exactly like in this movie. And I thought: How many of these seconds are allotted for the rest of my life? How cool is it that I’m still alive?”
With death surrounding him, he has turned from someone who never had any urge to participate in combat into a man who now thinks a lot about killing.
“When I see how my friends are killed and maimed in the war, when my wife writes to me that she sits with our 2-yearold son in the basement for several hours, when my relatives tell me that they cannot work due to power outages, because the Russians bombed the power plant, I feel great anger inside me,” he said. “At such moments, I want to run into an attack on the Russians, who are standing a few kilometers from me, and shoot them all.”