After the Fall
By Chris Cassingham
To the Victory!
Dir. Valentyn Vasyanovych, Ukraine, no distributor
To the Victory! played at Museum of the Moving Image on April 26 as part of First Look 2026.
We first hear the title of Valentyn Vasyanovych’s new film To the Victory! during an early scene when Vasyanovych, playing a version of himself, and his best friend, Vlad, get drunk on a rooftop and make a toast to Ukraine’s recent victory in the war against Russia. Their simple cheers over a shared bottle of liquor places the film in a near, imagined future, one in which Ukraine has prevailed over their aggressor but is also left with an anguished population of young and middle-aged men who stayed behind to fight. In spite of this, Vasyanovych operates in a hopeful mode, colored by the homosocial camaraderie similar to what you might find in a war film, but transposed onto a creative class that now has to navigate its ambient grief.
During that rooftop scene, Vasyanovych and Vlad fall over each other in their mild stupors, embracing almost like lovers one moment and fighting like enemies the next, after he suggests his next film—the one we see him and his collaborators trying to make throughout To the Victory!—should be about the dissolution of Vlad’s family. Elsewhere, Vasyanovych’s son, Yaroslav (Hryhoriy Naumov), drops out of university, plays violent video games, and drinks to excess once he comes into some money from a new job—an understandable if predictable trajectory for a young man whose youth has been marred by war.
This culture of unattended alcohol consumption and erratic masculinity might recall Cassavetes's Husbands. Unlike Cassavetes, however, Vasyanovych doesn’t normally act in his films. Before production on To the Victory! began, he hired a professional actor who, due to his duties in the armed resistance, eventually had to back out. As he is playing a film director trying desperately to get his next project off the ground, Vasyanovych’s presence imparts extra import to a film about how art can best speak to a politically charged moment. The absence of professional actors in the cast (Vasyanovych notes in press materials that everyone in front of the camera had roles behind it) is a comment on the fragile state of Ukrainian filmmaking that goes beyond the normal logistical challenges of the craft. As the scraps of a news reports on the radio in the first scene highlight, Ukraine is in a demographic crisis. There’s no need to fret over logistics when there’s no one left to stand in front of the camera.
Vasyanovych’s presence also lends a metatextual layer to the film’s construction. To the Victory! is not just a film about the making of a film—it’s a film about the making of a film, in which that fictional film is also about a struggling filmmaker trying to make a film. The premise offers delightful, compounding formal surprises as the viewer becomes more attuned to its conceits. Where the opening scene—breakfast between Vasyanovych and Yaroslav that plays out with unremarkable naturalism—is ruptured by the sound of “Cut!” when Vasyanovych exits the frame, a later scene between Vlad and another friend/collaborator (Serhii Stepanskyi), far more natural and emotionally grounded, is subject to elements outside human control, namely a mine-inflicted pothole that violently jostles the car they’re shooting in. This time it’s Vasyanovych's sudden appearance in, rather than departure from, the frame (he was hidden with his monitor behind the backseat) that alerts us to the grim reality that, even under the best of conditions, a director has only so much control over his art.
Perhaps as an act of defiance to a seeming lack of control, there are 23 shots across To the Victory!’s 104 minutes, an even more extreme ratio than Vasyanovych’s 2019 breakout feature Atlantis (28 shots in 108 minutes). At an average of four minutes, each is a self-contained drama with its own formal conceits and emotional crests and falls. Taken together they feel like Vasyanovych’s attempt to make the most of the feature film form; as if, in an unaccommodating political and cultural context (Vasyanovych has been vocal about his displeasure with Ukraine’s film-related governing bodies), an edit would be akin to deprivation.
Adding to the reflexive nature of To the Victory!, Vasyanovych features a scene in which he and Vlad watch Atlantis and commiserate on their slim chances of getting their next film into festivals. As cynicism burrows its way into the conversation, Vasyanovych suggests he and Vlad shoot a sex scene together; “It’s trendy!”, he remarks, not entirely incorrectly. What follows is a jokey procession of pantomime erotic advances. His hand on Vlad’s upper thigh, rising up to his stomach and chest. Vlad protests through giggles until suddenly he’s straddling Vasyanovych. The whole charade is perverse and titillating for all the reasons you can think of—how haven’t they, as best friends in a world functionally without women, fucked already? But seeing these particular straight guys openly playacting queerness is all the more engrossing because of the reality of their bond. As sarcastic as their near copulation is, their tight, minutes-long embrace the morning of Vlad’s departure from Ukraine, captured by the camera’s uninterrupted gaze, is just as sincere.
A constant drive toward political import motivates the fictional Vasyanovych’s artistic choices. This moment in history, he says, calls for something more than simple relationship dramas; the perpetual tragedies of separation are what the film within the film should be about. Of course, in acknowledging this internal conflict, To the Victory!, the film without all the metatextual trimmings, ends up being precisely about family separation without ever spelling it out. Collapsing the emotional distance between a father and son can have the same, or greater, impact as the physical reunion of husband and wife. Making a film with your best friends can be as profound an experience as watching them depart for another country. That Vasyanovych chooses to focus on the former scenarios is proof of the necessity of hope—even if you have to make it up.