In the spotlight
Yuliia Hontaruk & Ivanna Khitsinska - Company of Steel
Film still: Company of Steel, dir. Yuliia Hontaruk
Telling the story of a generation: Making Company of Steel
How do you make a documentary film about a war that just won’t end? For Ukrainian director-producer team Yuliia Hontaruk and Ivanna Khitsinska, the answer is as multifaceted as their current project, Company of Steel.
This mammoth character-driven documentary observes the lives of three young men—a TV presenter, an engineering graduate, and a tattoo artist—who endure the horrors of the battlefield in eastern Ukraine in 2014, struggle to rehabilitate in civilian society, and are thrown back into the war in 2022. Production began eight years ago, and, like the war itself, has lasted most of a generation.
Nevertheless, Company of Steel is not a war documentary. Not in any conventional sense, at least. Made by filmmakers who evade easy categorization, the project culminates a lifetime of artistry and craftmanship.
“I’m a debut producer,” says Khitsinska, who has held senior positions at the Film Industry Association of Ukraine and the Odesa International Film Festival, and is a Member of the Board of Ukrainian film Academy. She never intended to become a producer, she explains. “But when the war started, everything changed.”
Hontaruk, for her part, holds degrees in thermal engineering and film directing, and is a member of the National Union of Cinematographers in Ukraine. Having spent much time in eastern Ukraine, she’s lived and worked as a filmmaker under shellfire since age 25.
“I decided that I was making a film about young guys who volunteered for the war,” the filmmaker says of her first visit to Mariupol in 2015. “I couldn't take up weapons and go fight. But I could talk about those who sacrificed their education, businesses, and physical and psychological health and went to defend my home.”
From this moment, Company of Steel began as a shared journey between Hontaruk, Khitsinska, and partner producer Alexandra Bratyshchenko. “When the war started...Yuliia told us: ‘Girls, I want to finish this film. You have to help me do this,’” Khitsinska recalls.
Photo: producer Ivanna Khitsinska (left), director Yuliia Hontaruk (middle) & producer Alexandra Bratyshchenko (right) at IDFA 2022
Fast forward a few years, and the team felt that same spirit of kinship when Latvian co-producer Uldis Cekulis signed on to the project—Khitsinska jokingly refers to him as their godfather in producing.
“Uldis was the first international co-producer who joined our team, our team of girls, and he believed that these stories should be told to a wider audience,” Khitsinska says. “Three girls, in a country with war, and we’re shooting a film on a military theme—it’s a tricky situation, but he believed in us.”
In time, the lengthy production period amounted to over 1000 hours of footage and four walls of sticky notes in the editing room. But Hontaruk never wavered from her staunch visual language and her utter devotion to her protagonists.
“My camera is always close to the characters. I hardly see the world around them—I observe them and their condition,” she says.
“I filmed them on combat missions, sat with them in the trenches, and fell under fire. Probably because of that they began to trust me and let me come so close to them.
“Yuliia goes closer and closer to the protagonist,” Khitsinska explains. “She becomes some kind of friend with them. Some of them even call her ‘Mom’.”
At one point in the film, a character notes that it’s impossible to go through the war without a trace. He asks himself: Why do you survive while someone else dies? The whole film, Hontaruk says, he is searching for an answer.
Likewise, the entire team—whether soldier or civilian, protagonist or filmmaker—emerged from the grueling production period with new understandings of life and death. The former, Hontaruk and Khitinska affirm, is the most important.
“Everyone experiences death in their own way. But in the end, everyone has a desire to live. If earlier [my characters] went to fight with a willingness to die, now they want to survive, to expel the enemy for the sake of living in this country. They all want to survive this war,” Hontaruk says.
In the end, Hontaruk and Khitsinska avow that Company of Steel is a story of a generation. And part of that generation is a group of young women filmmakers who refuse to be compartmentalized. Speaking to them, it becomes crystal clear that this film is not a war story. It’s not a national story. And it’s certainly not a “women’s story”. Perhaps, most of all, it is a story about the act of storytelling itself—at a time when it’s needed the most.
By Julia Yudelman