Iryna Tsilyk is tired. The Ukrainian poet and film-maker apologises for her English, unnecessarily, and for her patchy cognitive ability, also unnecessarily. The whole of Ukraine, you could say, is tired: tired of the missiles, the deaths, the stress, the grief, and of the guilt that seems to afflict everyone from frontline soldiers to those in safer exile abroad for “not doing enough”. Tsilyk, an author of light-footed, vivid poems and of tender, quietly devastating films, says she has been diagnosed with depression. She shrugs: it’s the same for a bunch of her friends, probably much of the population.
It is hardly surprising, given the extreme pressure Ukrainians are living under, more than two and a half years into Russia’s fullscale invasion. Tsilyk’s husband, the novelist Artem Chekh, is in the armed forces. He fought in the war that began in 2014 after the Russian-backed takeovers in the Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk. His 10 months in the trenches back then were intensely difficult for the couple. So was its aftermath after the initial euphoria of his return, Tsilyk tells me.
Chekh plunged very low, even entertaining suicidal thoughts. What saved him, she says, was “for the first time starting to work with his hands, not with his head”. He became, for a while, a prop maker on productions such as the TV series Chernobyl. He rejoined the army the day after the full-scale invasion, on 25 February 2022, and has been on the frontline of some deadly battles.
Her latest film script, she tells me, began as the story of her feelings on one of the terrifying days when Chekh had disappeared into the vortex of the battle for Bakhmut, out of contact, fate unknown. (He is stationed in Kyiv now, away from the combat zone.) In the end, though, she rejected that idea. “I felt that I trapped myself,” she says, “because that day was actually full of stress and pain and nothing else. And I don’t want to make one more film about suffering. I wanted to save some space for jokes, for black humour.”
Tsilyk, in both her films and her literary work, weaves together such seeming incompatibilities: jokes amid horror; or the way “normal life” (say, sitting on the terrace of a hipster cafe in Kyiv, as we are doing now) jostles up against the unspeakable (nightly air raid alerts, the proximity of death).
One of her poems, translated into English by her as My Day, draws out some of these painful juxtapositions. It starts with the narrator being woken at 4am by an air raid siren, falling back to sleep, making breakfast for her son, going to a soldier’s funeral, hesitating between zinfandel and pinot noir in the supermarket, getting a message from her husband on the frontline to say that he is OK, crying in the shower … “a typical day overall”, as the poem dryly concludes.
Red Zone, the working title of the film, will be an animated documentary. The form will allow her to exit the outer world of realism and explore the sheer surreality of living through war. She is an admirer of Ari Folman’s 2008 film Waltz With Bashir, a pioneering animated documentary that tells a nonfiction story through the memories and dreamscapes of its protagonist.
Red Zone’s visual style will come from the Hungarian art director Flóra Anna Buda, whose sexy, stylish, strange movie 27 won her the short film Palme d’Or at Cannes last year. The main character of the film is, like Tsilyk, a poet, and Red Zone will bring these two aspects of her, poet and film-maker, closer than ever, she tells me – though “film critics usually say my films are quite poetic, and literary critics say that my poetry and writing in general is very visual”.
She’s so glad to have both disciplines in her life, she says: she feels all the richer for it. In practical terms, it’s good to have poetry when the Ukrainian film industry is “paralysed” she says – not only by war and an extreme strain on funding, but through the inadequacies of the state film agency, which many Ukrainian film-makers are boycotting at the moment. (Red Zone is so far receiving its funding from France and Luxembourg.)
Tsilyk becomes animated when talking about poetry in Ukraine right now. “Poetry is so cool! The other arts, they are not as powerful by far!” She is thinking of its huge popularity in Ukraine now, and how it is perhaps the form that can best capture the fracturing of meaning, even the explosion of language, that the war has brought about.
And it brings people together. Last year she and other Ukrainian poets went on tour to give readings in Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv – cities that were, and are, being daily pounded by Russian missiles. In Zaporizhzhia, the venue had a capacity of 300 but 700 squeezed in. In Mykolaiv, 400 came in the middle of the working day and listened to poems for three hours. Watching people take off flak jackets before listening to poems was profoundly moving, she says. You could think of it as a metaphor: you remove your hard shell and make yourself porous to the art.
She has a new collection out, called Thin Ice, the title a reflection of the anxieties that abound around human relationships right now in Ukraine; the way encounters with friends or strangers are made fragile by people’s often hidden traumatic memories, by the gulf between people’s experiences.
Tsilyk’s venture into animated documentary is the latest in a line of artistic reinventions: her films have certainly not repeated themselves. The Earth Is Blue as an Orange (2020) is a documentary following a family living near the frontline in Ukraine’s east in the years immediately before the full-scale invasion. She travelled back and forth from the warzone, feeling deeply for her subjects yet little thinking that eventually missiles would start falling on her own Kyiv. Part of her purpose in Red Zone, she says, is to express that sense of shock, and to warn western European audiences that: “war is much closer than they imagine – we also couldn’t imagine these rocket and drone attacks on Kyiv.”
That was followed in 2022 by a feature, an adaptation of her husband’s latest novel, Rock, Paper, Grenade, an autobiographical story about a young boy growing up in the 1990s. (Chekh’s book will be published in English translation next year by Seven Stories.)
She was born in 1982, he in 1985: they were both deeply shaped by the chaotic years of economic collapse after the fall of the Soviet Union. For her, there was also a teenage process of discovering her own connections to Ukrainian culture, which had been submerged under the years of Soviet rule. She discovered the richness of Ukrainian literary heritage, and switched from the Russian that had been spoken in her immediate family – at first gradually, then decisively when she was pregnant with her son, Andriy, who plays the young boy in Rock, Paper, Grenade, making the film truly a family affair. Tsilyk and Chekh together adapted his book while he was still working on it, so that the works are truly intertwined; he was also script supervisor on the set.
For her, making the movie meant taking a deep, empathetic look at her parents’ generation. “We found ourselves in a completely different reality,” she says of the great disruptions of the 1990s. “And our parents, and all the adults, felt so confused. They were trying to find some balance in this shaky experience, but they were failing again and again. And we were kids, and it was so difficult to forgive them their mistakes. Most of us had this trauma of poverty. We felt hungry for everything, literally. I mean we really wanted to eat something tasty. But not only that: we wanted nice jeans, some sneakers, and we were dreaming about those other worlds, those European countries and everything we never had.”
The Ukrainian title translates literally as “Felix and I”. Felix is a troubled, hard-drinking Afghanistan war veteran, and his relationship with the young protagonist lies at the heart of the film. On it goes, the trauma, needling its way through the generations. Even with chroniclers as empathetic as Tsilyk, its sharpness perhaps cannot be blunted. But at least it can be spoken of, gently and with understanding, and better understood.
• Iryna Tsilyk will appear at Lviv BookForum on 5 October. Along with a selection of others from the festival, which runs from 2 to 6 October, the event will be available online in partnership with Hay festival
• The Earth Is Blue as an Orange is on BBC iPlayer
• Rock, Paper, Grenade is available in many European countries on HBO Max
