In Rule of Two Walls, Ukraine’s Culture Is a Gun

Rule of Two Walls — which takes viewers inside Ukraine in the early days of the Russian invasion — is rooted in director David Gutnik’s Ukrainian heritage. 

After Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces attacked the country in February 2022, Gutnik connected with Ukrainian cinematographer Volodymyr Ivanov and started planning a journey into the embattled nation his family had fled from once upon a time. 

“Whenever somebody would say the word ‘calling,’ I would kind of roll my eyes,” Gutnik says. “But there was something that I just didn’t totally understand and couldn’t rationalize. I was like, ‘I gotta go. I don’t know what I’m gonna do, but I gotta go.’

“My first idea for what this movie was going to be was about Ukrainian refugees. My family — my parents, my sister, my grandparents — were refugees of a prior Ukrainian refugee generation.”

His curiosity was piqued by a Washington Post article he read in Warsaw, Poland, while waiting to cross the Ukrainian border. It was about Lyana Mytsko, the head of the city’s municipal arts center, and her efforts to preserve Ukrainian culture in wartime.

“She had said that, ‘Putin says we don’t exist, we don’t have a history, we don’t have a culture, and the art needs to prove them wrong. The artists need to be like a gun of Ukrainian culture.’ And I was like, Who’s that?’ So, everything kind of shifted at that point.” 

How the the Rule of Two Walls Team Made Their Film While Living Through War

Gutkin, a Brooklyn-based filmmaker whose past films have included the narratives Brighton Beach and Materna, both released in 2020, has earned a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score for Rule of Two Walls since its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2023. The film has only become more urgent since the U.S. presidential election added to the uncertainty surrounding Ukraine.

The documentary is shaped by the unfathomably interdependent flow of fate and doorways that mysteriously appear for those who trust their hearts enough to walk through. 

Ivanov, one of three credited cinematographers, opened some of the doors. He connected Gutnik with producer Olga Beskhmelnitsyna, who chose to remain in Ukraine after Russia’s invasion to connect crew with journalists and filmmakers. 

“Everyone just sort of overnight became a resistance fighter in some form or another. And the form that that took for Olga was that she was working as a fixer,” Gutnik says. “She got me my press credentials, and helped me get my military credentials to shoot in Ukraine.”

Ivanov and Beskhmelnitsyna joined sound recorder Mykhailo Zakytskyi, assistant editor Meredith Lawder, composer Andrew Orkin and even Gutnik himself as subjects who speak out in the film about their war experiences. 

“I’ve shot a lot of films and worked with a lot of crews, but I’ve never worked with a crew that was in a war zone where their country was under attack,” Gutnik explains. “And so it just kind of immediately became apparent that these people are part of the film.

“At the end of the first day of shooting, I came up to the sound recordist with a boom, saying, ‘Hey, can you say a few words about your experience?’ And he sort of looked at me like, Well, this is new.”

Rule of Two Walls effectively blurs the lines between nonfiction and narrative, crew and character, soldier and artist, war and peace, and atrocity and spirituality. Though there are plenty of horrific images scattered throughout the film’s 77-minute runtime, the focus is on a resilient community of Ukrainian artists who commit to fighting back the only way they know how, all while their beloved country burns and crumbles under a steady barrage of missile strikes, composing a daily score of explosions and air-raid sirens. 

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“Putin denies that Ukraine and its culture exist altogether. This is obviously a lie,” Mytsko says in the film. “I think that we don’t need to yell and stomp and scream, ‘We are here! We are someone!’ All you have to do is just open your eyes and look at us.” 

Art is a cannon of culture, making the defiant creation of it in a time of war a fascinating frontline rarely seen in the war-movie genre. Gutnik’s eye favors the Ukrainians barricading their monuments over those battling artillery, and the artists risking life and limb to restore gorgeous murals on walls painted over by the Soviets in the last century. Paintings, drawings, masks and music, presented alongside the personalities producing them, create a mosaic of museum-worthy shots. 

“What was really important to the filmmakers — to me, to the cinematographer, to all the artists involved — was to take everything that we’re talking about and to turn these ideas into a cinematic language,” Gutnik says. “Whether it’s a shot, or it’s the edit, or it’s the sound mixing choice, or it’s the composing, the choice of how we’re scoring the film, or how we’re grading the film. 

“When we graded the film, it has a dramatic arc. It starts off in a very desaturated Soviet palette, and by the end, it has color, it’s decolonized.

“The film is a kind of art object about artists, and we’re cinema artists, so we tried to make this cinema art object about these artists.”

One of the most haunting pieces in Rule of Two Walls is a steady shot capturing the repeated Russian bombardment of a market swarming with rescue workers attempting to extinguish the flames. 

“I think about it at least once a day,” Gutnik says. “The cameraman stands pat and doesn’t move. Like, how many of us would stand 10 feet away from a missile strike and just not move and keep rolling?

“It really captures the meaning of the work we’re doing with cinema. On the surface, it’s journalistic, it’s recording, it’s a report: Look what they’re doing. But underneath, there’s something far more complex and profound at work. This person — this Ukrainian — saying I’m not going to move. I exist. I am here and I’m not going anywhere. This is the reason why Russia failed to decapitate Ukraine in three days as predicted; why it’s three years later and this war is still going on.”

Rule of Two Walls is now available on video on demand, from Monument Releasing.

Main image: Lyana Mytsko and Stephan Burban in Rule of Two Walls. Monument Releasing.