8 Thursday May 26 2022 | the timesarts
‘He came to rescue
people and was
killed in cold blood’
Mantas Kvedaravicius, director of Mariupolis 2, a film about
the war in Ukraine, was killed by Russian soldiers before he
had finished it. Hanna Bilobrova, his partner, tells Ed Potton
about the pain of bringing the film to Cannes without him
has been working round the
clock. The responses at
Cannes were emotional —
from audiences and from the
people who made the film.
“We’ve been sitting laughing
and crying,” Bilobrova says,
lighting a strong-looking
brown cigarette. Soon she will
be crying again, and so will I.
The quietly pulverising film
focuses on a community in
an unnamed neighbourhood
of Mariupol, the port city on
the Sea of Azov that Russia
began besieging in February.
“Everything is in ruins,” says
one citizen. There is rubble
as far as the eye can see; plumes of
smoke on the horizon; craters, some
several metres deep. The film has no
music, commentary or external
explanation, just the regular boom of
artillery fire, the occasional streak of
rockets and the high rattle of lighter
weaponry. At night the skyline is
dotted with flames, Mariupol
becoming Mordor. A man describes
finding the corpse of a neighbour,
blown into a tree. They identified him
by his white gardening gloves. Later
we see two bodies that have been deadG
od it must
feel strange.
Standing on
a terrace in
Cannes,
Hanna
Bilobrova
blinks in the
sunlight. Below her the yachts
bob in the marina and
paparazzi wait on the red
carpet for the next
limousine-load of celebrities.
Tall and poised in a leather
jacket, jeans and red lipstick,
the Ukrainian film-maker
looks like a movie star, and
she has worked as an actress.
She isn’t here for the glitz, though.
Less than two months ago Mantas
Kvedaravicius, 45, a Lithuanian
director and Bilobrova’s partner of
several years, was captured and
murdered by Russian soldiers in
Mariupol, where he and Bilobrova, 29,
were shooting a documentary,
Mariupolis 2. “I looked for him for five
days,” she says evenly in accented
English. Finally the Russians led her to
him. “His body — they just put it on
the ground.” Amazingly, given that
she must have been in shock, she gotthe footage they had recorded out of
the country. Mariupolis 2, of which she
is the co-director, was edited in weeks
and finished days before being shown
at the Cannes Film Festival.
“We knew that Cannes was around
the corner and we also knew Mantas
would have loved to show his film
there. The organisers of the festival
were very responsive,” says Nadia
Turincev, the film’s producer. Turincev
is sitting beside Bilobrova with the
heroic editor, Dounia Sichov, whoh
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Hanna Bilobrova at Cannes last week o