ODESA – “Frost,” a film by Lithuanian director Šarūnas Bartas featuring French actress Vanessa Paradis, premiered in Ukraine on July 20 during the Odesa International Film Festival, which is being held on July 14-22.
The film was co-produced by Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, and France. It will run in Ukrainian cinemas in October, in Lithuania at the end of the summer, and in France in January.
The screening at the Odesa Film Festival was the second showing of “Frost” after it had received a standing ovation at 49th Directors’ Fortnight, an independent section held in parallel to the Cannes Film Festival.
The movie tells about the fighting in the eastern Ukraine through the eyes of a young Lithuanian man Rokas, played by Mantas Janciauskas. Rokas drives across Ukraine to the country’s east to deliver humanitarian aid to Ukrainian soldiers.
A clip from “Frost” (2017), a movie about the war in Eastern Ukraine. (Youtube)
The crew shot the scenes in Ukraine for 3.5 months. The locations included Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and Ukraine’s war-affected towns of Kurakhove, Maryinka, and Krasnohorivka.
Rokas, who seems to be in apathy at the beginning of the movie, decides to go to Ukraine because he is curious about the conflict. He wants to see the war as much as he wants to help. However, when he actually comes to Ukraine, it turns out that the war looks nothing like he expected.
The film tries to show the conflict in eastern Ukraine from a foreigner’s point of view.
Paradis plays a war journalist who Rokas meets in Ukraine – not at the front line, as one could expect, but in a fancy hotel far away from shelling partying with a group of her colleagues, where they drink whiskey and chat about whether a war in the east is a hybrid war.
Like Rokas, Paradis’ character is tired of the routine and desperate searches for truth: She might be the only person in a film who didn’t form her impression about the conflict and who tries to look at things objectively.
“The war is the most boring thing,” said Andrzej Chyra, who played one of the journalists in a film, during the press conference on July 20 after the film screening. He added that there is nothing exciting about war, unlike its often portrayed in media.
He added that there is nothing exciting about war, despite how it is often portrayed by media.
The producers of the film said at the press conference that the hardest part of the shootings in the eastern Ukraine was to get permission from authorities. They also had trouble keeping it up with the schedule because actors improvised a lot, instead of following the script.
As Rokas continues his trip, gets closer to the front line, he sees ruined abandoned buildings, meets people who stay in the hometown despite evacuation, and meets the Ukrainian soldiers. The servicemen were played by real soldiers.
“War is shit,” Janciauskas, who played Rokas, told the Kyiv Post on July 20 after the premiere. “But for some reason, it’s natural for humanity to start wars. I don’t understand that.”
Janciauskas is not a professional actor: He is doing his master in filmmaking and agreed to play in a film because wanted to work with director Bartas.
He said that he was following the situation in Ukraine closely because Lithuanian people also fear the possibility of Russian aggression. He said that he watched many documentaries about war and also worked with refugees who fled from Syria, Ukraine, and Afghanistan.
