timeThe occupying Russian soldiers barely noticed the old woman shuffling through the farmland surrounding her village outside Kiev, taking her goats to pasture. But her attention was focused on them. After finding their location, she took the goat home and later called her grandson, a soldier in the Ukrainian army, to provide the coordinates.

The story is one of seven episodes in a feature film about the war in Ukraine, based on true but slightly fictionalized events during the first year of the full-scale Russian invasion, which will be released later this year. All seven short films have one thing in common: they tell the story of conflict from an animal's perspective.

The anthology War in the Eyes of Animals has been in the works since the first months of the war, when a group of Ukrainian filmmakers decided that using animals to tell the story of the Russian invasion would provide a new and unusual take on way to tell the story of the Russian invasion. Go home and experience the horrors of war.

"Animals are not political, but they feel good and evil," the film's producer Ole Kokan said in an interview in Kiev. "We also see that this war is an ecocide that will affect the ecology of Europe and the world."

Much of the film was shot in and around the Ukrainian capital, which has been relatively safe since Russian troops withdrew after the first weeks of the war. But continued drone and missile attacks still make completing the mission challenging. One of the episodes featured a pet rabbit owned by the director, but the animal died from shock during an air raid the week before filming, Kokan said.

One of the short clips stars Hollywood actor Sean Penn as an American sound producer who orders some audio of birdsong from a Ukrainian colleague as war breaks out. Kokan said Penn has agreed to donate his film costs to charities supporting Ukraine.

Another protagonist is the film and theater actor Oleksandr Pecherytsya, who signed up for the Territorial Defense Forces at the beginning of the war and spent the first winter of the war in military uniform directly from the inspection Stand up and shoot the scene. Protecting. He doesn't need to change to play the role of a soldier.

"It was weird, I was holding an unloaded prop gun when I was filming, and 15 minutes earlier I was holding a real gun," he said.

Until February 2022, his only experience with weapons was with stage props, but he served in the armed forces for more than a year, first in the Kiev region and then around Kharkov.

"My acting skills proved very useful in the war. I tried to compartmentalize what I saw and tried to separate it from normal life. Of course, it didn't quite work, but my experience as an actor It really helps,” Pecherytsya said.

After serving for a year, he left the military and returned to showbiz. He said he would return to service if Kiev was threatened, but added that the cultural front was equally important at the moment. Originally from Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine, Pecherytsya grew up speaking Russian, and most of his early work was in Russian films or TV series shot in Ukraine.

“After 2014, I made a rule that I could only make Ukrainian-made work, made by Ukrainians,” he said. But even then, much of the production was shot in Russian and then dubbed into Ukrainian, as the producers hoped to sell it in several post-Soviet markets. Now, Pecherytsya only speaks Ukrainian and does not speak Russian in daily life.

"I think there is also a struggle now for Ukrainianness - for the Ukrainian language, theater, cinema, for the development of all these things and to escape the shadow of Russianness," he said.

Ukraine's film industry, like everything in the country, was affected by the war, as many people either left the country or served on the front lines. But the movie is still in production. Ukrainian filmmakers focused primarily on documenting the war. A recent documentary directed by Oksana Karpovych, "Intercept," combines audio of phone calls made by Russian soldiers returning home with images of the devastation they wreaked in Ukraine.

Kochan describes the film about animals as part of a "cultural front" in a larger battle. "We are in an information war, and movies are one of the most persuasive tools," he said.