Militantropos
Director: Alina Gorlova, Simon Mozgovyi, Yelizaveta Smit aka TABOR collective
Writer: Alina Gorlova, Simon Mozgovyi, Maksym Nakonechnyi, Yelizaveta Smit
Seen on: 28.2.2026

„Plot“:
Militantropos is a combination of the words „milit“ – soldier and „antropos“ – human. It chronicles life in Ukraine during its war with Russia, from soldiers in battle to grandmothers in small villages just trying to exist.

I hadn’t planned on watching Militantropos, but the film I wanted to see was sold out, and I quickly decided to see it instead. In hindsight, I might have preferred to read my book instead, despite the film’s cinematography making it worthy of the big screen.

Don’t get me wrong: The war in Ukraine is an on-going horror that deserves to be chronicled, if only to remind people that Russia is still attacking them and that people are still dying and impoverished and suffering. So, I am not saying that I would have preferred to read my book because the topic isn’t important or interesting.

The trouble is that I am not really sure what the documentary is getting at. There is barely any narrative framing, except a few more or less philosophical title cards that left me puzzled more often than not. The sequences that we are offered do little to illuminate the title cards and vice versa. And often those title cards felt a little propagandistic to me, making enduring this violence and fighting back into something more heroic than it maybe should be portrayed as.

Of course, it is not entirely wrong that continuing in the face of such destruction has something heroic, but it is almost like the documentary wants to portray it as something desirable, and that gave me a whole lot of pause, and not even the really fantastic cinematography could relieve me there.

The result is a series of vignettes that seem more or less disconnected from each other. If the message of the film is that nothing remains unaffected by war, neither remote regions, nor animals, it achieves to transport that message, but also – it is a little self-evident, no? Then again, people who aren’t at war seem to forget its effects, so we better be reminded.

Summarizing: I’m a little stumped.