'Animals can feel good and evil': film puts new perspective on Ukraine war [View all]
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/19/animals-can-feel-good-and-evil-film-puts-new-perspective-on-ukraine-war
Animals can feel good and evil: film puts new perspective on Ukraine war
Collection of seven shorts due out in 2025 tells story of conflict from perspective of animals
Shaun Walker in Kyiv
Sun 19 Jan 2025 03.00 EST
The occupying Russian soldiers paid little attention to the elderly woman shuffling through the farmland surrounding the villages outside Kyiv, taking her goat to pasture. But she was focused closely on them. After locating their positions, she headed back home with the goat, and later called her grandson, a soldier in the Ukrainian army, to give the coordinates.
The story is one of seven episodes, based on real events from the first year of Russias full-scale invasion but lightly fictionalised, that make up a feature film about the war in Ukraine, due out later this year. All seven of the shorts have one thing in common: they tell the story of the conflict from the perspective of animals.
Filming has been under way on the anthology War Through the Eyes of Animals since the first months of the war, when a group of Ukrainian film-makers decided that using animals to tell the story of Russias invasion would provide a new and unusual way to bring home the horror of war.
Animals have no politics, but they can feel good and evil, said Oleh Kokhan, the films producer, in an interview in Kyiv. We also see this war is an ecocide, which will affect the ecology of Europe and the world.
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