War has a way of attracting storytellers, different kinds at different phases of the story. Usually the journalists get there first, before the authors and historians arrive to place events in a grander narrative. The artists tend to be among the stragglers, though their works, once out in the world, can have the greatest resonance.
The release of Porcelain War, the Oscar-nominated documentary about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, shows that the artists have arrived to tell their version, and it is unlike anything the experts and reporters have shown us. For the filmmakers, this was no accident. “My main fear in making the film,” the co-director, Slava Leontyev, told me recently, “was that we would end up capturing something like a reportage.” His partner on the project, Anya Stasenko,…
