Ukrainian Highway Journey Dramedy ‘Luxembourg, Luxembourg’ Heads to Venice

The journey to the Lido has been longer than most for Ukrainian director Antonio Lukich, whose sophomore function, “Luxembourg, Luxembourg,” has its world premiere Sep. 7 within the Horizons strand on the Venice Film Festival.

For the reason that Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, Lukich’s life has been upended. Pressured to flee Kyiv in the beginning of the warfare, the director spoke to Selection from Sweden, the place he’s amongst 4 Ukrainian filmmakers who have been granted a residency with the assist of the Göteborg Movie Fund.

It’s, he acknowledges, a world faraway from the one he left behind. “It’s an ideal alternative to develop Ukrainian tales while you can’t develop them proper now in Ukraine,” he mentioned.

“Luxembourg, Luxembourg” stars real-life rap duo Ramil and Amil Nasirov as twin brothers who develop up within the shadow of their lacking father, a small-time criminal who vanishes sooner or later with out a hint. Whereas one in all them decides to comply with his path of petty crime, the opposite turns into a policeman. Someday, after they discover out he’s gravely sick in Luxembourg, they set out on a journey to see him one final time.

The movie, which has its North American premiere in Toronto on Sep. 9, is produced by Vladimir Yatsenko and Anna Yatsenko of Fore Movies and government produced by Alexandra Bratyshchenko. Paris-based Celluloid Goals is dealing with world gross sales.

Talking to Selection forward of the premiere, Lukich mentioned “Luxembourg, Luxembourg” was partly impressed by his relationship along with his personal father, who he described as “a stranger to me” when the director was rising up.

After receiving information a number of years in the past that he was dying in “a rich European metropolis,” Lukich was torn. “A part of me wished to go to him as a result of I liked him very a lot. And a part of me was afraid of him,” he mentioned. “Ought to I’m going, or ought to I keep? Ought to I be answerable for him as he wasn’t answerable for me? This dialogue inside me discovered this eventual course within the twins [of ‘Luxembourg, Luxembourg’].”

The query of fatherhood has taken on new which means for the 30-year-old, whose personal son was born whereas he was creating the movie, and never lengthy earlier than his debut, “My Ideas Are Silent,” gained a particular jury prize at Karlovy Range in 2019. In opposition to the backdrop of the warfare in Ukraine, it’s additionally taken on added urgency, mentioned Lukich, noting: “Now there will likely be a era of absent fathers.”

On the day of the Russian invasion, the director packed his spouse and three-year-old son into their automotive and headed west — a two-day drive, extended by infinite site visitors jams and gas shortages. After a number of weeks of relative calm in Western Ukraine, his household continued onward to Slovenia; Lukich returned to Kyiv, the place he and his producers raced to finish “Luxembourg, Luxembourg,” which they’d realized simply days earlier than the invasion can be premiering in Venice.

What adopted was a mad scramble to recuperate materials from onerous drives and flash drives scattered throughout the town, at the same time as a lot of the manufacturing workforce had both fled Ukraine or taken up arms in opposition to the Russian Military. Throughout that interval, Lukich was separated from his household for 4 months, a painful time that made the director replicate on his personal upbringing.

“That is the most important concern in my life: to turn into an absent father, and to depart somebody I’m answerable for with none assist,” he mentioned. “I had no assist. Every thing I did in my life, I did on my own. And it was actually onerous to determine be a guardian, be a director, be a public particular person.”

The thought weighs closely on Lukich because the warfare drags on and the loss of life toll climbs. Whereas trapped in limbo in Western Ukraine, he had taken his son to a puppet theater for refugees fleeing the hostilities within the east. “It was an enormous corridor, and I used to be the one father there,” he mentioned. “In that second, I noticed a tragic future [in Ukraine] with mothers and their children and no fathers.”

Since July, the director and his household have been reunited in Sweden, the place he has begun to develop two new options. One of many movies is targeted on his native metropolis, Uzhhorod, one other follows a gaggle of refugees who’re trapped in a “deeply absurd” scenario — “a movie about cultural conflicts, and exploring the borders of morality,” he defined.

For a director whose movies probe at loss with a light-weight contact, usually discovering humor in unlikely locations, the warfare has compelled Lukich to rethink the function of Ukraine’s filmmakers. “Battle actually reveals what’s essential and what’s not essential — not solely in life, however in cinema as effectively,” he mentioned. He insists, nonetheless, that cinema is a crucial technique to “make your personal ache comprehensible for everybody.”

A number of months in the past, Lukich attended a screening of his first function, which was being proven to refugees in Lviv. The movie follows a Ukrainian sound recordist who’s employed by a Canadian online game developer to seize the sounds of animals within the wild — notably the elusive Rakhiv mallard, a uncommon species of duck that’s native to the Carpathians (and maybe extinct).

“Attempting to grasp the character of miracles is the primary theme in my films — attempting to catch one thing that’s uncatchable,” mentioned Lukich. He considers the search to be the identical, whether or not it issues “the sound of a non-existent duck or a father who solely exists in recollections.”

The screening in Lviv marked the primary time for the reason that begin of the warfare that he discovered himself surrounded by moviegoers. The viewers was effusive in its reward of his movie, he mentioned, and its portrait of the world because it was earlier than the Russian invasion. “It grew to become a reminder of that peaceable life. Of that Ukraine.”