At the beginning of 2022, director David Gutnik flew to Warsaw with the intention of making a film about Ukrainian refugees, who, since the invasion of the country by Russia, count some 8.3 million. But his instincts would lead him elsewhere. His eventual documentary, while still steeped in war, would instead focus on a small group of people who have fiercely and defiantly chosen to stay in Ukraine: the artists.
Premiere at the Tribeca Festival on June 8 Two walls rule sets its focus on a handful of Ukrainian artists who, rather than flee their homeland, stay to make art as an act of resistance. Leading the pack is Lyana Mytsko, the director of the Lviv Municipal Arts Center, which served as both a refuge and a gallery during the war. It is Mytsko who says NPR in March 2022 that every Ukrainian artist “is a canon of Ukrainian culture”.
When Gutnik read the interview, “I was like, ‘Who is this person?'” he told Artnet News. “I want to meet her.”
Lyana Mytsko, as seen in Two walls rule, directed by David Gutnik. Photo courtesy of New City/Old City.
Mytsko would serve as Gutnik’s informal guide in Lviv, leading his team through raw encounters and candid dialogues with designers ranging from rapper Stepan Burban to wearable artist Serhii Petrov. They follow the illustrator Bohdana Davydiuk as she sticks her strikingly designed posters around town (“Our fire is stronger than your bombs,” reads one); and they talk to Diana Berg on his video series mourning the bombing of the Mariupol Theater.
Even in the most casual conversation, artists demonstrate both boldness and grief, for which art is an outlet as much as a channel. As Petrov says in the film: “This war changed the creators. Since art is my life, my only source of life, I will definitely try to create something. If I don’t, I’ll be finished.
Gutnik even turns the camera on his own Ukrainian film crew, whose stories of loss and resistance are captured in voiceover. Their art, precisely, is the film we watch.
“It became immediately obvious and necessary and right to include them in a portrait of artists because their stories are as extraordinary as the other artists in the film,” Gutnik said.
The film is equally personal to Gutnik, a Ukrainian-American himself a refugee. The outbreak of the war, he says, awakened something in him, as it did in Ukrainian artists and the diaspora.
“We were inspired,” he said. “We were inspired to own and claim this Ukrainian identity.”
Actually, Two walls rule is rather a portrait of this identity and this culture, which have long been suppressed by the Russian Empire. Gutnik said so himself in the documentary, in a voiceover that describes how his Ukrainian identity was subsumed by the fact that he only speaks Russian.
Language is only one factor. The anonymous artist Kinder-Album, while showing his searing paintings of his experience of war, told the filmmakers, “Culture is an action and a product of a people. It is not possible to have a nation and not have a culture.
In the documentary’s most iconic scene, Mytsko oversees the restoration of a Ukrainian apartment where workers were removing layers of whitewash, once applied by the Soviets, to reveal centuries-old murals.
“Nobody was supposed to stand out. The idea was to destroy identity,” said a restorer of Soviet efforts. We discover an identity that existed here before.
Of course, amidst this revival, there are heartbreaking reminders of the war. Corpses are pulled from ditches, fires break out in bombed-out buildings, and the National Art Museum of Ukraine stands empty save for the remains of a hasty evacuation. For Gutnik, cutting between the art on the walls of the Lviv Municipal Arts Center and the carnage on the streets encompassed the “highs and lows” of his own experience making the film.
It is also a reality against which the resilience of the country’s artists takes on acute and urgent relief.
“In a better world, this movie doesn’t exist,” Gutnik said. “But on the other hand, there’s something really impressive about them and their work. I felt like I was in the company of giants. It made me proud; it made me feel connected.
Two Walls Rule premieres at the Tribeca Festival beginning June 8 at SVA Theater, Village East by Angelika and AMC 19th St. East 6.
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