Valentyn Vasyanovych For Victory film work marks a turning point in a career built behind the camera. For years, Vasyanovych was known first as a cinematographer and director whose fixed camera watched war and its aftermath without rushing to explain them. In To the Victory! — released and discussed in English under titles including For Victory! — he steps into the centre of the frame himself, playing a filmmaker who stays in Kyiv while his wife and daughter build a new life in Vienna. The film is not a conventional war drama. It imagines a time after the fighting has formally ended and asks a quieter, harder question: what happens to families, friendships and art when the war is over on paper but not in people’s lives?
That question has shaped Vasyanovych’s films for more than a decade. His best-known works before this one, Atlantis (2019) and Reflection (2021), followed a former soldier and then a surgeon trying to live after violence. For Victory! completes that arc from a different angle. Its central figure is not a soldier returning home, but an artist who never left and now finds that staying has its own cost. The film won the Platform Prize at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. That fact alone explains why the film has drawn attention beyond festival circles, but it does not explain its tone. Reviewers have described a work that is melancholy and funny at once, personal without claiming to be a straight autobiography, and formally disciplined in the way Vasyanovych’s cinema always is: long, static shots, conversations held in full, and silences left intact.
From Zhytomyr to Kyiv: Training as a Cameraman and Documentary Maker
Valentyn Mykolayovych Vasyanovych was born on 21 July 1971 in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. His training explains much of his later style. He studied cinematography and documentary filmmaking at the Karpenko-Kary National University of Theatre, Cinema and Television in Kyiv, an institution also listed in English sources as the Kyiv National University of Theatre, Cinema and Television. He then studied at the Andrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing in Poland in 2006–2007, graduating from that programme in 2007. Festival biographies list diplomas in both camerawork and documentary direction, and that double training has stayed visible throughout his work: he thinks like a person who frames a shot and like a person who waits for real life to enter it.
Documentary came first. His early short Keepsake (1998) was a documentary focused on his own family, made while he was living and working with other artists in Kyiv. Against the Sun (2004) brought him wider recognition as a filmmaker and won several awards, according to festival biographies. Those early works established a pattern that would recur: small-scale production, close observation, and a willingness to let a scene run longer than a conventional drama would allow. They also established his habit of working across roles. On his own films he has repeatedly served as director, writer, cinematographer and editor, and often as producer as well. That is not a vanity credit. In a cinema built on a fixed frame and precise duration, the person who decides where the camera sits, how long it stays there and where the cut falls is making the central artistic decisions, and Vasyanovych has kept those decisions in his own hands.
The Tribe and the Education of a Visual Storyteller
Before his own features reached major festivals, Vasyanovych made a decisive contribution to another director’s film. He was cinematographer and producer on Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi’s The Tribe (2014), a drama set in a school for deaf students and performed in sign language without spoken dialogue or subtitles. The film won the Grand Prize at Cannes Critics’ Week and was described in festival biographies as the most successful Ukrainian film in recent history at that time. For Vasyanovych, the experience mattered for craft as much as reputation. The Tribe demanded long, choreographed takes in which the camera had to follow complex action without cutting away from it, and it proved that an audience would stay with a film that refused conventional explanation.
His own debut feature, Business as Usual (2012), had already shown that he was moving from documentary toward fiction. Festival filmographies also list Kredens (2013) and Crepuscule (2013, documentary) among his works from this period. The period shows a filmmaker learning to carry documentary patience into invented stories. He did not abandon observation when he began directing actors. He brought the same attention to rooms, workplaces and routines, and he began to use performers — including non-professional actors whose appearance and experience resembled their characters — as part of that observation rather than as decoration around a plot.
Black Level: A Dialogue-Free Portrait of Midlife Crisis
Black Level (2017) was the film in which Vasyanovych’s own directorial language became unmistakable to international audiences. It is a dialogue-free film about a wedding photographer in a midlife crisis, a man whose professional life consists of staging other people’s happiest days while his own life comes apart. The film follows him after the loss of his sick father and the breakdown of a relationship, and it does so largely without words, relying on gesture, routine and the camera’s steady gaze. It was awarded the FIPRESCI Prize at the Odesa International Film Festival, and it was selected as Ukraine’s entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 90th Academy Awards, although it did not reach the December shortlist.
The importance of Black Level goes beyond its festival record. It proved that Vasyanovych’s static camera was not only a way to film war. It could also film ordinary disappointment, loneliness and the small rituals by which a person tries to keep going. The wedding photographer photographs celebrations for a living, yet the film refuses to treat his crisis as a single dramatic event. Instead it accumulates mornings, jobs, phone calls and empty rooms until the audience understands his state without being told it. That method — accumulation rather than exposition — would become the engine of his later war films as well. In Black Level, the crisis is personal. In Atlantis and Reflection, the same method would be applied to a crisis shared by a whole society.
Atlantis: A Post-War Future Filmed Before It Happened
Atlantis (2019) is the film that made Vasyanovych an internationally recognised name. Set in eastern Ukraine in 2025, a year after an imagined end to war, it follows Serhiy, a former soldier played by Andriy Rymaruk, who suffers from post-traumatic stress and struggles to adapt to civilian life. The smelter where he works finally closes. His friend dies. Serhiy then joins the volunteer Black Tulip mission, which exhumes the bodies of war dead, and through working alongside Katya, played by Liudmyla Bileka, he begins to imagine that a better future might still be possible. The landscape around them is scorched, industrial and waterless, and the film’s title carries its irony: a place named for a lost, drowned world, now dried out and broken.
The film won the Best Film Award in the Orizzonti section of the 76th Venice International Film Festival in 2019. It also won the Golden Tulip, the top international award, at the 39th Istanbul Film Festival, the Special Jury Prize at the Tokyo International Film Festival, and the Best Cinematography Award at the Seville European Film Festival. In Ukraine it received the Taras Shevchenko National Prize in 2021, awarded to Vasyanovych and production designer Vladlen Odudenko for the film. It was selected as Ukraine’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the 93rd Academy Awards, but did not make the December shortlist. Critics noted that Atlantis consisted of only 28 static shots, according to a count cited by Variety, a number that captures how deliberately the film withholds cutting.
What made Atlantis unsettling after 2022 was not only its subject but its timing. It had imagined a post-war Ukraine in 2025, filmed in part around Mariupol, including the Azovstal site that would later become known worldwide during the siege of May 2022. Vasyanovych has since presented the film again at festivals and spoken to foreign audiences about the war, and he has also documented war crimes in places such as Irpin, according to interviews from that period. Atlantis does not predict events in any simple sense. It imagines what survival costs after victory, and that question became more painful, not less, once real war returned on a full scale.
Reflection: Captivity, Return, and the Difficulty of Telling
If Atlantis looked at a soldier after the war, Reflection (2021) looked at a man during and after captivity. The film was selected for the main competition of the 78th Venice International Film Festival in September 2021. Its central figure is Serhiy, a surgeon played by Roman Lutskyi, whose ex-wife Olha is played by Nadiya Levchenko and whose teenage daughter Polina is played by Nika Myslytska. Serhiy enlists after being haunted by the bodies arriving from the eastern front, is captured almost immediately in Donbas, and is forced to work as a doctor inside a prison where fellow captives are tortured and killed. After a prisoner exchange returns him to Kyiv, he must live with what he saw and find a way to tell his daughter and ex-wife why Andriy, Olha’s new partner played by Andriy Rymaruk, will not come back.
Reflection is constructed, like Atlantis, almost entirely from wide, static long takes. Reports on the film count about 29 shots across its running time, with the camera moving only when necessary and with no cutaways or conventional coverage. The compositions use architecture, windows and mirrors to create frames within frames, and the film’s title works on several levels: literal reflections in glass, the act of looking back, and the moral reflection demanded of a man who survived by participating in a system that destroyed others. The film does not offer catharsis. Its second half is slower and more domestic, as Serhiy tries to reconnect with Polina, and the tension comes from what remains unsaid between a father who cannot describe captivity and a daughter who needs an explanation he cannot give cleanly.
Together, Atlantis and Reflection established Vasyanovych as a filmmaker of aftermath. Both films are about people who have already survived the worst event and must now survive the life that follows it. That concern separates him from directors who treat war as a series of battles. For Vasyanovych, the battle is often already over when the camera starts, and the drama is in the months and years of living with its consequences: work lost, families changed, bodies to be buried or identified, and language that fails at the exact moment it is most needed.
A Cinema of Stillness: How Vasyanovych Builds a Scene
Vasyanovych’s visual language is easy to describe and hard to imitate. The camera is usually fixed. The frame is deep, so that foreground and background both remain in focus and action can unfold at several distances at once. Scenes play out in extended takes, sometimes for many minutes, and editing is minimal. The effect is closer to watching a stage or a room than to watching a conventional film, because the audience cannot rely on a cut to tell it what matters. It must watch the whole space: who enters, who leaves, who stays still, and what changes almost imperceptibly while nothing dramatic appears to happen.
This approach shapes performance as well. Because the camera does not cut to a close-up to underline an emotion, actors must carry feeling through posture, timing and small gestures. Vasyanovych has often worked with non-professional performers, and in Atlantis and Reflection the casting of people with lived experience close to their roles added a documentary weight to fiction. The sound design, with Serhiy Stepansky among his regular collaborators, is similarly restrained: room tone, distant industry, footsteps and silence do work that music might do in another film. The result is a cinema that some viewers find demanding and others find unusually honest. It refuses to hurry grief, and it refuses to decorate it either.
The method also explains why his films travel well at festivals but remain arthouse works rather than mainstream releases. A fixed camera and a small number of shots are not a gimmick for Vasyanovych. They are a moral position: that the audience should stay in the room with a character for as long as the character must stay in that situation, without the relief of a cut. When that discipline is applied to a wedding photographer, it produces a portrait of midlife emptiness. When it is applied to a soldier exhuming bodies or a surgeon returning from captivity, it produces something closer to witness.
Valentyn Vasyanovych For Victory film: The Project at the Centre
The full Ukrainian title of the new film is Za Peremohu!, rendered in English as To the Victory! and discussed as For Victory!. It is a 2025 Ukrainian–Lithuanian production, described in festival and reference listings as a docudrama and as a comedy-drama. Vasyanovych wrote and directed it, edited it, shared cinematography credit with Mykhailo Lubarsky, and took the central acting role. The production companies are Arsenal Films, M-Films and ForeFilms, with producers including Volodymyr Yatsenko, Anna Yatsenko, Vasyanovych, Marija Razgutė and Iya Myslytska. Distribution is handled by Best Friend Forever. Its running time is listed as 105 minutes.
The film had its world premiere in the Platform section of the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival on 7 September 2025, where it won the Platform Prize. That prize is awarded for directorial vision and distinctive storytelling, and the win placed a small, intimate Ukrainian film alongside much larger festival titles. The Platform section is a competitive programme, and winning it gave the film a profile that a quiet, formally rigorous work might otherwise struggle to achieve. It also confirmed a shift in how Vasyanovych was being seen: no longer only as a cinematographer who became a director, or as the maker of two severe war films, but as a filmmaker willing to turn the camera on his own profession and on himself.
For a film made by a tiny team under wartime conditions, that recognition matters because it extends the film’s life beyond a single festival premiere and into wider discussion of European cinema. Shortlisting, where it occurs in awards reporting generally, is not a win, and it should not be described as one: it means a film was selected among fiction features under consideration for an award, a distinction that reflects its standing among European films of its year.
The Story: A Filmmaker Who Stays, a Family Split by Distance
For Victory! is set in an imagined post-war Ukraine. A title card and radio broadcast in the film place the action about a year after the war, in October 2026, in a country whose population has fallen below 30 million as many Ukrainians have fled abroad. That setting is fiction, not a forecast, and the film uses it to explore a situation that already exists in real life: families divided not by a single decision, but by years of separation that gradually become a new normal. The central filmmaker, Valyk, lives in Kyiv with his teenage son. His wife and younger daughter have lived in Vienna for three years and do not plan to return. Valyk understands that he cannot simply follow them, because he cannot imagine fulfilling himself outside Ukraine, and he cannot leave behind the work, friendships and sense of home that still anchor him there.
Rather than building a plot around a single crisis, the film follows Valyk as he tries, with his son and filmmaker friends, to start an experimental film project. That project-within-the-project gives the film its self-referential quality. Valyk is a director trying to make a film while the film around him is being made, and his friends debate, joke, argue and hesitate in ways that feel closer to conversation than to scripted drama. His close friend Vlad, played by Vladlen Odudenko, is considering leaving filmmaking altogether, moving to Spain and becoming a bartender in order to reunite with his family. That contrast — one man staying for art, another leaving for family — is the film’s emotional centre. Neither choice is presented as simply right. Both carry loss.
The tone is where For Victory! most clearly departs from Atlantis and Reflection. Festival coverage and reviews describe it as a dark comedy as well as a drama, with an ironic edge. Vasyanovych has described the film’s humour as a comedy about older men struggling with intimacy, masculinity and survival in a country marked by absence, and press-kit interviews note that the ironic tone was a deliberate choice. The humour does not lighten the subject. It makes the sadness more specific, because jokes in the film are often the way characters avoid saying what they fear: that the family may never live together again, that a career may already be over, or that hope itself has become a habit rather than a conviction.
Making the Film in Wartime Kyiv With a Tiny Crew
The production history of For Victory! is part of its meaning. The film was shot in Kyiv during the full-scale invasion, with a skeleton crew of only six to eight people, all close collaborators of the director. The small team worked across roles, acting in the film and working behind the camera, and Vasyanovych has described the project as a form of collective support and psychological release for the group, a way to keep working and observing while reality remained uncertain. Festival funders describe frequent power outages and the limitations of working with a reduced crew, conditions that would have stopped a conventional production but became part of this film’s method.
Financing reflected the same patchwork. The project received a development grant from the European Solidarity Fund for Ukrainian Films in 2023, among the first Ukrainian projects to receive such support, and a finalisation grant from the same fund in May 2024. In 2024, Eurimages provided funding for the project as a European co-production. Earlier, Vasyanovych developed the screenplay with support from a Netflix-funded development grant, as one of 48 Ukrainian filmmakers selected by the Ukrainian Film Academy for that scheme. The Lithuanian co-producer M-Films supported the film as part of a concerted effort to help Ukrainian filmmakers. None of this makes the film a large production. It makes it a film that exists because institutions, colleagues and the director himself kept a small project alive through war.
That scale suits the story. For Victory! is not about armies or governments. It is about a handful of people in rooms, talking about whether to stay, whether to leave, and whether making art still matters when so much has been destroyed. A large crew and elaborate sets would have contradicted that intimacy. The tiny crew, the static camera and the use of real Kyiv locations give the imagined post-war setting a documentary texture, even though the story itself is invented. The audience is asked to believe not in the fictional date, but in the conversations.
What the Toronto Win Changed, and What It Did Not
Winning the Platform Prize at Toronto did not turn For Victory! into a mainstream hit, and it should not be described as if it did. What it did was give the film a clear festival identity: a prize-winning work by a director already known for Atlantis and Reflection, now working in a lighter, more personal register. Toronto’s Platform Prize honours directorial vision, and for Vasyanovych that recognition landed on the exact qualities that define his work — a distinctive formal approach, a willingness to imagine a future rather than only document a past, and a central performance by the director himself that blurs the line between filmmaker and character without collapsing it entirely.
Press-kit material stresses that the film is not a straightforward autobiography, even though it draws on Vasyanovych’s own life and the lives of those around him. That distinction shapes how the film should be read. Valyk is not simply Vasyanovych under another name, and the Vienna–Kyiv split in the story should not be reported as a fact about the director’s private family life. The film uses autobiographical material as a starting point and then invents, exaggerates and reorders it in the service of fiction. Reviewers who call it semi-autobiographical are pointing to that mixture, not claiming that every scene happened. The power of the film comes from that mixture: it feels lived-in because its details are observed, and it feels like art because its structure is chosen.
The win also drew attention to the film’s place in a loose trilogy. Screen Daily described To the Victory! as the third in Vasyanovych’s so-called dystopian trilogy, following Atlantis and Reflection. The label is useful if it is understood loosely. The three films do not share characters or a continuous plot. They share a question, asked in three different registers: after war, how does a person live? Atlantis answers with landscape and labour. Reflection answers with captivity and return. For Victory! answers with a filmmaker, his friends and a family that may never be reunited in one place again.
Valentyn Vasyanovych For Victory film: Cast and Credits
The cast and credits of For Victory! show how many roles Vasyanovych himself carried, and how much the film depended on a circle of trusted collaborators. He is credited as director, writer, producer, editor and cinematographer, and he also plays the lead role of Valyk. Just seven actors are credited in the cast list, according to festival press material, a remarkably small cast for a feature: Vasyanovych himself, Vladlen Odudenko, Marianna Novikova, Hryhoriy Baklanov, Daria Matsiyevska, Oleksiy Nahirniai and Oleksandr Kolisnyk. That smallness is deliberate. By keeping the cast small and the crew close, Vasyanovych keeps his working method consistent: few faces, long takes and a close attention to lived detail. In Atlantis, he had cast the former soldier Andriy Rymaruk in the lead role, and the production relied on the same kind of trust: a non-professional lead whose experience was close to the character’s. In Reflection, he gave Roman Lutskyi the role of a surgeon returned from captivity, another performance built on a form of witness rather than polish. Those credits show that a film described as tiny was still a fully crewed work, and that the smallness refers to the production rather than to the attention given to each craft role. Vasyanovych’s decision to act in his own film is also part of that point. The long takes, the decision to keep the camera still, the refusal to explain with dialogue and the decision not to cut away are also decisions about how the director presents himself as an actor.
The ensemble around him includes Vladlen Odudenko as Vlad, Marianna Novikova as Sofia, and Hryhoriy Naumov as Yaroslav, the teenage son figure in the story. Mykhailo Lubarsky shares cinematography credit and appears in the film, and Serhiy Stepansky is credited for sound. The original score is by Dominykas Digimas. Production design is credited to Vlad Odudenko and Vitalii Sudarkov, costume design to Hanna Chabaniuk, and visual effects to Yan Vasyanovych. Those credits matter because they show that a film described as tiny was still a fully crewed work in the creative sense, even when the on-set team numbered only six to eight people. Friends played multiple parts in the making of the film, and that overlap between life and fiction is part of why the performances feel unforced.
For viewers coming to Vasyanovych through this film, the credits also provide a map backward. Odudenko was the production designer honoured alongside Vasyanovych for Atlantis. Stepansky has worked on sound across his films. Lubarsky’s presence as both cinematographer and performer continues the director’s habit of collapsing the boundary between crew and cast. For Victory! is therefore not a break with his past so much as a new arrangement of familiar elements: the same collaborators, the same static camera, and a new subject — the filmmaker himself.
Why This Film Matters Beyond Festivals
For Victory! matters beyond its prizes because it refuses two easy stories about Ukraine. The first easy story is that victory ends suffering. The film’s title is ironic in exactly this sense: the toast “to the victory” is spoken by people who are still living with separation, unemployment and uncertainty, and the film asks what victory means if families remain divided and artists cannot work. The second easy story is that artists in wartime must either make propaganda or fall silent. Valyk’s experimental project is neither. It is small, uncertain and possibly futile, and the film treats the attempt itself as meaningful, even when its outcome is unclear.
The film also matters as a document of a particular Ukrainian cultural moment. It was made by filmmakers who stayed in Kyiv, funded in part by European solidarity mechanisms created to keep Ukrainian cinema alive during war, and premiered at a major North American festival while the war it imagines ending was still ongoing. That context does not make the film good by itself, and festival coverage is careful not to claim that it does. It does explain why the film’s imagined future feels urgent rather than escapist. Imagining a post-war life is, for these filmmakers, a form of work in the present: a way to think about what kind of country, family and cinema might be possible after the fighting stops.
For audiences outside Ukraine, the film offers a different entry point into Vasyanovych’s work than Atlantis or Reflection. Those films demand patience and a tolerance for stark images. For Victory! still demands patience — its shots are long, its conversations are unhurried, and its humour is dry — but its subject is more immediately recognisable: a middle-aged man trying to hold together work, friendship and family when all three are pulling in different directions. That recognisability may be why the film has been described as warm as well as bleak, and why its Toronto win was framed as recognition of a distinctive storytelling voice rather than only of a political subject.
Where to Start With Vasyanovych, and Where For Victory! Fits
A viewer new to Vasyanovych could start with any of his three major features and still understand his project, because each film restates the same concern in a new form. Black Level is the best starting point for his visual method without the weight of war. Atlantis is the best starting point for his reputation, and for the image of post-war Ukraine that made him known. Reflection is the most difficult of the three, and the most direct about violence and its aftermath. For Victory! is the most personal and the most accessible in tone, even though its subject — a divided family and a stalled career — is no less serious.
Festival screenings have carried the film beyond Toronto, including screenings at European film festivals, presented in Ukrainian with English subtitles. That kind of listing is typical of the film’s distribution path so far: festival and curated screenings rather than a wide commercial release, with details varying by venue. Readers should therefore check local festival listings rather than assuming a general cinema or streaming date, which has not been established. The film’s life, like Vasyanovych’s earlier films, is likely to grow through festivals, retrospectives and curated programmes before any wider release is announced.
What remains constant across all these films is the director’s trust in duration. He trusts that if the camera stays long enough, a room will reveal a relationship, a landscape will reveal a history, and a conversation will reveal a decision that the characters themselves have not yet admitted. In For Victory!, that trust is tested in a new way, because the person in the room is the director himself. The film’s achievement is that it does not use that fact as a shortcut. It still makes the audience watch, wait and listen, and it still leaves the hardest questions — should Valyk stay, should he go, will the family ever live together again — unanswered at the end.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Valentyn Vasyanovych primarily an actor or a director?
He is primarily a director, screenwriter, cinematographer, editor and producer. Acting is the exception in his career, not its centre. He took the lead role in For Victory! because the story is about a filmmaker, and because the film’s self-referential structure benefits from the director playing that figure himself. His reputation was built behind the camera, first as cinematographer on The Tribe and then as director of Black Level, Atlantis and Reflection.
Is For Victory! a true story about Vasyanovych’s own family?
No, not in a literal sense. Festival press material describes the film as informed by his own life and the lives of those around him, but not as straightforward autobiography. The Kyiv–Vienna split, the stalled career and the experimental film project are fictionalised material used to explore real dilemmas faced by many Ukrainian families and artists. The film should be discussed as fiction with autobiographical roots, not as a documentary record of the director’s household.
Do you need to see Atlantis and Reflection first?
No. For Victory! stands alone, with its own characters and situation. Knowing the earlier films adds context, because the three works share a concern with life after war, but the new film does not depend on their plots. A viewer who starts here will still understand Valyk, his son, his friends and the choices they face, and can then go back to the earlier films to see how Vasyanovych developed the same themes in more severe registers.
What language is the film in, and is it subtitled at festivals?
The film is in Ukrainian. Festival listings, including Calgary’s, present it in Ukrainian with English subtitles. That is consistent with Vasyanovych’s earlier work, which is also in Ukrainian, and with the film’s setting in Kyiv and its characters’ lives in Ukraine and Vienna.
Why is the film sometimes called To the Victory! and sometimes For Victory!?
The Ukrainian title is Za Peremohu!. English-language sources render that toast in slightly different ways, and festival, awards and press listings do not all use the same English wording. To the Victory! is the title used in Toronto and many festival listings, while For Victory! appears in other English-language coverage. They refer to the same 2025 film by the same director.
Has For Victory! won a European Film Award?
Not as a winner. It won the Platform Prize at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Being shortlisted for an award, where that happens, places a film under consideration for that award; it is a significant distinction, but it is not the same as winning an award, and the two should not be confused. It has not won a European Film Award.
What makes Vasyanovych’s directing style different?
The most distinctive feature is the fixed, deep-focus camera and the small number of long takes. Scenes are allowed to play out in real time, without frequent cutting or close-ups to guide emotion. That style forces attention onto rooms, landscapes, gestures and conversations, and it gives his films a meditative, sometimes uncomfortable tempo that is very different from conventional drama or war cinema.