After three and a half years of devastating war, the conflict in Ukraine has spawned scores of documentaries. Most of them concentrate on the human cost. Some follow the frontline battles so closely that audiences duck when shells explode, or bullets whip by.
In Sisters of Ukraine, acclaimed American documentary director Mike Dorsey (Lost Airmen of Buchenwald, Tupac Murders) takes a different approach. His focus is on the dedication put in by people in #Europe to help Ukrainian refugees find peace and hope, far from home.
A race against time
Set up as a race against time, Dorsey’s film zeros in on the Spanish charity that is relocating #refugees – mostly women and children – in a beautiful old #Catholic seminary building in a community on the outskirts of Barcelona.
It is October 2022, the war is eight months old, and the heavy aerial attacks on civilian infrastructure have only just begun.
The film follows a chronological path – starting with the two volunteers from the Spanish charity who will travel to a Catholic Convent in western Ukraine, from where they will pick up a group of nearly 40 refugees from the war-torn east.
Charity organisers are worried, checking the news to ensure the trip can be made safely. The two volunteers are stoical, but determined. There is a quiet bravery and spirit of self-sacrifice that drives them.
There is a quiet bravery and spirit of self-sacrifice that drives them.
Unremarkeable beginnings
It all begins unremarkably: a flight to Warsaw, a long day’s drive to the Polish-Ukrainian border—a race to reach the Convent before the 11 pm curfew kicks in.
It was all very familiar for this writer: in the same month in 2022, I met a Ukrainian producer in Warsaw and joined him for the drive home to Kyiv. It was my first time in Ukraine since the war had started, and I too was nervously checking the news before leaving. I recall the shock of approaching the capital and passing the burned-out remains of shopping malls destroyed during the initial fighting in late February and early March before the Russians withdrew from the Kyiv region. We too stopped in western Ukraine – in #Lviv – because of the curfew. The next morning, I attended a funeral for fallen Ukrainian soldiers and met the mayor, whom I had last seen during the #Maidan Revolution# in February 2014.
Deja vu
There was a sense of deja vu about watching this elegant film.
The first day of the Spaniards’ mercy mission is captured in intense autumnal colours and beautiful sunset drone shots over the splendid churches of the Lviv region.
Welcomed in the dark by the Convent’s head, an English-speaking Ukrainian Nun, and another sister who speaks Spanish, the next couple of days dive into the community of love and service the nuns offer. Not only do they host refugees – including one elderly lady who witnessed the Russian rocket attack on Kramatorsk Railway Station in April 2022 that killed 63 people and wounded 150 others – but they run a school too.
The musical score – taken from classical music performed by leading Ukrainian symphony orchestras – and slow-motion camera work, create a sense of timeless innocence.
It does not last long. A Ukrainian sabotage attack on the #Kursk Bridge# that connects the Russian mainland with #Crimea, which #Moscow seized in 2014, attracts a violent Russian response, with missile attacks on cities across Ukraine. The nuns relocate everyone to their school because their Convent is situated near a Ukrainian airbase, which could be a target.
Ukrainian fighter jets streak across the sky, and the Mother Superior is forced to tell the refugee group – still in far-off #Odesa, the southern #Black Sea# port – to delay their departure.
The Spanish team are forced to rethink. The coach booked to take the refugees to Barcelona has been postponed. Which road out of Ukraine is safest? The way they came in? Or should they go south, via Hungary? It is a nail-biting time.
Delaying only a day, the music – and sunshine – returns as the refugees finally arrive and the short trip to the Polish border (the Hungarian plan having been abandoned) is made without incident.
A couple of days later, in the mellow light of a Spanish autumn, the refugees arrived at their new home, where they shared their many stories, sometimes tearfully told, during the coach journey.
Dorsey’s film offers a fresh approach to the disruption of the war in Ukraine, adding to the rapidly growing documentary canon.
