Damian Kocur: “I don’t have the moral right to show the war as it is because I am not Ukrainian”

Promotional poster for Under the Volcano.

The sun has set on a Tenerife hotel, and a poolside conga column formed by some of its guests shuffles merrily into frame. In the foreground sit the Kovalenko family. They do not partake in the festivities. The father, Roman, instead, reads aloud the latest accounts of Russia’s bombardment of their home country.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began just a few nights ago, on what was supposed to be the last night of the Kovalenkos’ holiday. With no flights home available, they are confined to the island, to passivity, until further notice.  

While the conga image could easily be an allegory for a very current, Trump-approved indifference to Ukrainian suffering, it in fact comes from a film that is almost a year old. Under the Volcano (2024), the prescient sophomore effort from the young Polish director Damian Kocur, was Poland’s submission for Best International Feature at this year’s Oscars. It continues to play the festival circuit to much acclaim. Kocur, who also co-wrote the script, spoke with me via video link about this startling film’s commitment to a faithful portrayal of displacement, its unconventional casting, and what it notably chooses to omit.

The beginning of Russia’s invasion sets the scene for the film, yet we never see its events directly. Aside from grainy news footage of an apartment block on fire, the unfolding horror shows itself exclusively through the dazed reactions of the Kovalenko family – comprising Roman (Roman Lutskyi), his wife Anastasiia (Anastasiia Karpenko), and his two children from a previous marriage, Sofiia (Sofiia Berezovska) and Fedir (Fedir Pugachov). They desperately receive updates on their phones, call friends and relatives to establish their safety and, powerless to do much else, continue their leisure activities. “I was thinking that it would be a good idea to speak about the war without showing the physical affects,” Kocur tells me, referring to his thoughts upon reading a real-life newspaper story that then inspired the Kovalenkos’ predicament in the film. This is “because most of the victims [of war] will be purely mental victims, not the physical victims of rockets, bombings, you know, most people suffer in a different way.” As an outside observer of the conflict, Kocur felt obliged to maintain some distance: “I don’t feel I have the moral right to show the war as it is because I am not Ukrainian,” he stresses at several points in our discussion. “I was trying to combine my own safe position – because I was in Poland at the time, like how my protagonists are not in Ukraine […] with this feeling of guiltiness and helplessness.”     

The mass-proliferation of violent images online, Kocur contests, has only strengthened the case against a more explicit approach. “I think nowadays it’s easy to get those images of pain, suffering and war. On YouTube, just by clicking a link, you can see dead bodies in Gaza or in Ukraine. I don’t think film has the need to do that, to show it. [Film] is more about hiding now, talking about things not in such a direct way. Just like photography took away from painting the need to depict the world realistically, social media has now taken this need away from cinema.”  

But this is not to say that the film reduces the war to an abstraction. Kocur, aided by the observational, “slow cinema”-style camerawork of cinematographer Nikita Kuzmenko, ensures that the Kovalenkos’ every interaction – with each other or those they meet on the island – bears some of that “guiltiness and helplessness”. Otherwise banal incidents are tied up in the larger calamity. When Anastasiia pushes an unamused Sofiia into the sea to encourage her to loosen up, it could simply read as a misstep in the already prickly relationship between a stepmother and stepdaughter. Or when Roman beeps at a British tourist blocking a road, the violent reaction that follows is typical “Brits abroad” fare. But what really frustrates Sofiia is that her phone – her sole means of contacting friends in Ukraine – is in her hand as she falls. And the emasculating image of Roman sat behind the wheel while a stranger assaults the family vehicle comes on the heels of his wife having already probed his willingness to join up to the far less trivial fight that awaits them at home.

Kocur acknowledges parallels with Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure (2014), which sees a parent’s poor conduct during a controlled avalanche turn a family ski holiday into an existential bind for all involved. He says the films share “this feeling of, “we are trying to live normal life in circumstances that don’t really allow us to,” because inside there is this kind of dark energy”. For Kocur, this translates to “old patterns and old conflicts going up like lava in a volcano”, hence the film’s title (Tenerife’s Mount Teide features throughout). But he issues a caveat to the Östlund comparison: “the situation of my protagonists is even worse. One of their relatives can still die, so the threat is real.” 

Fittingly, there are moments when a figurative eruption appears inevitable. The presence of Russian holidaymakers at the resort is painful. Sofiia films a Russian woman at the pool before following her to the door of her hotel room. The teenager, reckoning with her sexuality, is given to filming young women on the island, but this moment carries more menace. Anastasiia, for her part, lambasts that woman’s family when their cheerfulness at breakfast becomes too much to bear: “Having a great time?” she asks in disbelief. Kocur derived such exchanges from real accounts of Ukrainians crossing paths with Russians abroad: “one guy told me that he was sitting on the beach, and he looked at this Russian guy and he thought maybe he should kill him, before the Russian guy [does the same to him] on the front in a couple of months.”

This kind of painstaking authenticity is important to Kocur. As with his debut, Bread and Salt, all the roles are filled by non-professional actors (aside from the central married couple). These are “real people and real emotions”, as the director puts it. I learn, somewhat disconcertingly, that when Sofiia breaks down upon hearing carnival fireworks, it is in fact a genuine trauma response based on the actress’s experiences in Ukraine: “[Berezovska’s reaction] was so strong that I thought to myself, “we have to keep it in the movie, we have to use it.”” Roman Lutskyi, though an established Ukrainian actor, also draws on his real past during a charming moment of respite where his character tells Sofiia about the romance (and rap battles) that coloured his youth. The film, with its “slow cinema” pacing and lack of true plot beats aside from the outbreak of war, nonetheless maintains real urgency thanks to these moments of stark naturalism.  

No less bold is the attention this Polish-Ukrainian collaboration pays to Tenerife’s West African refugees. “My aim wasn’t just to make a film about the war in Ukraine, it was more about saying something about displacement,” Kocur says. “Making a film about displacement without showing those who landed on the same island as my protagonists would just not be right.” Kocur draws parallels between the Kovalenkos and “maybe the only ones who can really understand their situation, because they lost their homes too”. In doing so, he had in mind the moral implications of his native Poland accepting large numbers of Ukrainian refugees while “there are so many people from the Middle East and African countries that we don’t want to let in”. That even those apparently favoured Ukrainians have since become a target of growing disdain in Poland has perhaps vindicated Kocur’s refusal to discriminate.

Out of that refusal comes a moving pairing. Sofiia meets a boy named Mike, and the pair sit on the quayside as he recounts the boat crossing that resulted in the death of his best friend, presumably a real story from another non-professional. The equivalence between the groups is not a facile one; Kocur admits that their circumstances are “maybe not comparable at all”. Indeed, the pair’s meeting cannot be called a dialogue in the true sense of the word – Sofiia does not remark on Mike’s story, and, amusingly, they cannot agree on who played the male lead in Titanic (“Brad Pitt”, Mike insists). But it is a movingly human moment of togetherness.

This approach allows the film to transcend the specifics of the events of February 2022. Its concern with human displacement on a more universal level is what shines through in the end. But this is not a cheap or easy move. Kocur’s eye for precise, naturalistic detail argues that universality is no barrier to complexity. Tellingly, the otherwise heartening scene where Roman recalls his youth ends on a note of irresolution: “To victory,” toasts Roman, beer in hand. “Over what?” asks Sofiia. An easier question, given the circumstances, would be “over whom?” But this is not a film that poses easy questions. On casting Sofiia, the film’s most complex character, Kocur says that “it’s much easier working with teenagers, they don’t cheat as much as we do.” Neither does the director cheat his audience, for that matter, and Under the Volcano is all the richer for it.

James Low is a freelance writer and recent Cambridge graduate in Slavonic Studies writing about Eastern Europe and the Caucasus.

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Film, Polish culture, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine at war, Ukrainian diaspora, Ukrainian refugees