Valentyn Vasyanovych
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TIFF(ty) 2025: The Fence, To the Victory!
In the 1999 mini-series Storm of the Century, a malevolent stranger (played by noted Canadian Colm Feore) shows up outside Stephen King’s longtime fictional community of Castle Rock and repeatedly says “Give me what I want and I’ll go away”—but he doesn’t tell anyone what he actually wants, instead telepathically manipulating people into suicide and other grisly events until finally unveiling his ask. Obviously this made a big impression on me when I was 13, but I’m told the series was in fact terrible, which isn’t hard to believe, and it’s definitely not what should have been coming to mind […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 15, 2025 -
“The Question of Whether Ukraine Will Exist at All”: Valentyn Vasyanovych on TIFF 2025 Premiere To the Victory!
When Valentyn Vasyanovych shot The Tribe (2014) by Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi, he was a cinematographer and emerging director. Shortly after, he developed an impressive oeuvre of his own beginning with Black Level (2017), a dialogue-free film about a wedding photographer in a midlife crisis. Similarly to The Tribe, Vasyanovych was exploring a novel cinematic language within a new wartime reality, establishing a formal strategy consisting of a strictly static camera and deep focus, extended mise-en-scène and minimal editing through which his films can be recognized. Two subsequent fiction features brought him international acclaim, whose frighteningly prescient narratives helped him attain the […]
by Sonya Vseliubska on Sep 4, 2025 -
Unsparing and Risky Visions: The 2022 First Look Festival
Although its current edition overlaps the waning days of industry monolith SXSW, the Museum of the Moving Image’s annual international showcase First Look originally really was the first look. A scarce few days into the new year, New Yorkers had the opportunity to sample stateside premieres of often boundary-fuzzing selections from the global festival circuit, kicking off the next round of the same even ahead of Sundance, which it could hardly resemble less. The timing has shifted since the festival’s launch in 2011, under now-New York Film Festival artistic director Dennis Lim, but if anything the mission has become more […]
by Steve Dollar on Mar 18, 2022
