“I Heard Shots Behind Me, Turned Back and Saw Killers Approaching”: Lesya Kalynska on Tribeca Premiere A Rising Fury

In Ukraine, Russian disinformation has finally met its lie-dismantling match in the information warfare sphere — which, ironically, within the larger landscape of our head-spinning, 24-hour news cycle, only serves to muddy the waters of “truth” even further. Fortunately, the besieged nation has a thriving documentary scene with a habit of taking the patient and longterm vérité approach. Out of that tradition comes Lesya Kalynska and Ruslan Batytskyi’s feature debut A Rising Fury, world-premiering at Tribeca Festival, the culmination of an often fraught, messily complicated eight-year filmmaking journey. This breathtakingly cinematic explainer of current events follows the young patriotic Pavlo, a soldier from the Donbas region where the war began in 2014, and activist volunteer Svitlana, a single mother who the infantryman met and fell in love with on the frontlines of the Maidan Uprising. Over the course of nearly a decade the pair’s hopes and passionate idealism is tested on the battleground of Russia’s insidious hybrid warfare, changing the couple and their beloved country forever — as it has the Ukrainian filmmakers behind the lens. A few days prior to the Tribeca launch on June 10, Filmmaker caught up with NYC-based, Kyiv native Kalynska (who heartbreakingly had to include a dedication in the film to her mom after she passed away post-evacuation from Bucha); while Batytskyi was understandably unreachable, too busy filming with the troops back in Ukraine.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.