‘Animals can feel good and evil’: film puts new perspective on Ukraine war
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Collection of seven shorts due out in 2025 tells story of conflict from perspective of animals. The occupying Russian soldiers paid little attention to the elderly woman shuffling through the farmland surrounding the villages outside Kyiv, taking her goat to pasture. But she was focused closely on them. After locating their positions, she headed back home with the goat, and later called her grandson, a soldier in the Ukrainian army, to give the coordinates.
![[Shaun Walker]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2019/08/19/Shaun_Walker.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
The story is one of seven episodes, based on real events from the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion but lightly fictionalised, that make up a feature film about the war in Ukraine, due out later this year. All seven of the shorts have one thing in common: they tell the story of the conflict from the perspective of animals.
![[Oleh Kokhan with a cow during filming for War Through the Eyes of Animals.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/74afb8f0fd8757b16d044cac6833d63308b8ba32/0_0_4032_3024/master/4032.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Filming has been under way on the anthology War Through the Eyes of Animals since the first months of the war, when a group of Ukrainian film-makers decided that using animals to tell the story of Russia’s invasion would provide a new and unusual way to bring home the horror of war.
![[Sean Penn.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/dab8ce80e22b0ddbb1c7a540f7366cece503691e/0_3_1080_648/master/1080.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
“Animals have no politics, but they can feel good and evil,” said Oleh Kokhan, the film’s producer, in an interview in Kyiv. “We also see this war is an ecocide, which will affect the ecology of Europe and the world.”. Most of the film was shot in and around the Ukrainian capital, which has been relatively safe since the withdrawal of Russian troops after the first weeks of the war. But the constant drone and missile attacks still made it challenging to finish it. One of the episodes was meant to feature a pet rabbit owned by the director, but the animal died of shock during an air raid a week before the filming, said Kokhan.
![[A man holds a microphone on a film set]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/496770fdca6de1fb3a3b0317704d8fe65cb14f4f/0_0_6000_4000/master/6000.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
