24/10/2022 - The first fiction film by Ukrainian director Iryna Tsilyk is a gentle drama about growing up set against a harsh 1990s backdrop

A boy called Tymophiy lives with his mother and grandmother somewhere in the Ukrainian outback in the early 1990s. One day, the grandmother brings an unusual guest back to the house: Felix (Yuriy Izdryk) is an Afghan war veteran and charismatic alcoholic who works at a local cultural centre. Felix strikes up a friendship with Tymophiy and shows the boy a real machine gun, and when Tymophiy grows up, he makes a “business” out of selling real combat grenades (hence the grenade in the film's title, Rock.Paper.Grenade [+see also:
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film profile]).

This is the first feature-length fiction film by well-known Ukrainian director and publicist Iryna Tsilyk, who won the Directing Award in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at Sundance in 2020 for the documentary The Earth Is Blue as an Orange [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Iryna Tsilyk
film profile]. The film was also selected for the Berlinale, IDFA, CPH:DOX, Hot Docs and more than 100 other international film festivals.

Tsilyk co-wrote the script for Rock.Paper.Grenade, which has just been screened in the International Competition of the Warsaw Film Festival, with her husband, Artem Chekh, the author of the novel Who Are You? (which the film is based on). Chekh is now at war, serving in the ranks of the Ukrainian Army. His book is a touching biography of a man who shared his special view of the war with him, and this is a memory that Chekh carried around with him throughout the years.

The shooting style of this feature is close to that of a documentary. For example, Tsilyk often uses long takes, which may seem excessive. However, this pacing is a perfect match for the melancholic tempo of the entire film. Tsilyk also does some masterful work with the sound and music, emotionally attuning the viewer to the next scene with the help of a sometimes playful soundtrack making use of classical music – for example, a polonaise by Michał Kleofas Ogiński. Every scene in the movie is well thought out and carefully calibrated with meticulous editing.

Tymophiy is played at different ages by three different actors – Andriy Cherednyk, Vladyslav Baliuk and Volodymyr Gladky – and these are well-chosen faces. His mother is played by Anastasiya Karpenko, who put on another brilliant performance in the film How Is Katia? [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Christina Tynkevych
film profile], where she plays a mother who has lost a child. This time, Karpenko takes on a less tragic role, but it’s one that also involves a subtle psychological game – according to the plot, the heroine's husband is constantly on business trips and eventually leaves the family altogether, which comes as a surprise to Tymophiy.

Rock.Paper.Grenade is a story about growing up, one’s first lessons in kindness and cruelty, teenage love, the search for a friend and mentor, and above all, the difficult relationships between children and adults in shaky, post-Soviet Ukraine.

Rock.Paper.Grenade was produced by Ukraine’s ForeFilms and Limelite.