‘To the Victory!’ TIFF Review: The Art of Filming Amid Conflict

A sort of conclusion to a trilogy—or the continuation of a saga without a clear ending—To the Victory! pushes forward and twists the ongoing exploration of Ukrainian filmmaker Valentyn Vasyanovych, whose last two films attempted to capture life in his country against the backdrop of its wars with Russia. While the earlier works (Atlantis and Reflection) focused on a previous conflict with that same neighbor—essentially the same war, just at a different stage—To the Victory! is rooted in a reality that more closely mirrors what Ukraine is living through today. But instead of building a fictional narrative that reflects Ukrainian society in a traditional way, the new film works as a meta-reflection that goes beyond the war itself, questioning how one even makes a film about such a subject.

The film constantly moves between two overlapping layers of fiction, one of them disguised as documentary. Vasyanovych himself plays the protagonist, essentially a version of himself: a Ukrainian filmmaker trying to make a film about his country. Within the film’s fiction, the year is 2026, the war has ended (though it’s never clear who won), and Ukraine’s most pressing drama is mass emigration: millions of people have left with no plans to return, while families—like the protagonist’s own—are split in two.

Vasyanovych opens with a fictional scene between a father (played by himself) and his 18-year-old son (Hryhoriy Naumov), only to cut it short and reveal it was a film shoot, assistants and script supervisors walking into the frame. This idea recurs throughout the movie, but after a point, it hardly matters which level of fiction we’re in. In every case, father and son remain in Kyiv, while his wife and daughter have relocated to Vienna, where they live without any intention of returning. It’s a de facto separation that could easily become real and permanent. That sense of rupture is one of many sources of unease in a film that blends drama, comedy, self-parody, and reflection on Ukraine’s present condition.

With his trademark long static takes, but also with a lightness absent from his earlier work, Vasyanovych weaves together not so much a story as a series of situations: the struggles of filming, the questions of what to film, his relationship with his family (the scenes with his son are among the strongest in the film), and the anxieties and drunken evenings shared with his friends—who, in reality, are the film’s own crew. Jokes and reflections abound: about the foundations that fund these kinds of projects, about the “intellectual” cinema he makes (which his son dislikes—he prefers “silly comedies”), about a potential suicide staged for drama that could sell more tickets, about the supposedly obligatory sex scenes arthouse films need to reach wider audiences, and other barbed comments not just about Ukraine’s situation but also, more caustically, about the industry and the trends surrounding films like his.

None of this means that at its core, To the Victory! isn’t still a meditation on a country devastated by war, struggling to recover and to imagine its future. It’s a film that converses with his earlier works, but in a more grounded way. The previous two, with their focus on the aftermath of war or the return of combatants, were heavier, more brutal, more tragic. Here another layer emerges, one that indirectly reminds us that cinema and reality speak to each other, resemble one another, but are not the same thing.

In the film’s narrative ebb and flow—sometimes languid, sometimes scattered—what also becomes clear is that the lives of people scarred by war are made up of contradictory emotions: visiting graves in a cemetery, saying goodbye to a partner perhaps forever, but also sharing laughs with friends, teaching a son how to drive, or simply trying to make films as a way of carrying on.