The blend of autofiction and metafiction that underpins Valentyn Vasyanovych’s To the Victory! does, at times, feel like a precarious balancing act that could topple at any moment, veering either towards too cloying of a wink to the audience or, conversely, revealing a building without strong foundation. Fortunately, neither is the case here.
As a film that reckons with Ukrainian futurity in the (eventual) aftermath of the 2022 Russian invasion and subsequent war, as well as the artistic process of engaging in that specific depiction, To the Victory! doesn’t hide the fact that it’s in constant tension with itself—and that Vasyanovych himself is in constant tension with himself as its creator. In playing the lead role as a lightly fictionalized version of himself, there is the sense that to bring his art forward as both a filmmaker and a Ukrainian while his country faces its greatest existential threat in generations, he must also do so with a personal immediacy that wasn’t as critical in his previous endeavours.
The central premise of the film, photographed in Vasyanovych’s usual static long takes, is that of the process of returning. What can be “returned” in a future postwar Ukraine? For Vasyanovych, it is a dual concern: Can he return to being the filmmaker he was before the war began? And can there be a Ukraine if those who fled the war refuse to return to their homeland after it ends?
The former question manifests itself in the way the film almost becomes a pseudo-documentary of its own creation, with Vasyanovych bouncing ideas off his collaborators and producers (many also playing fictionalized versions of themselves) and “filming” scenes for the film-within-the-film that may have been manifested as an actual film in an alternate timeline. But it is Vasyanovych’s struggles to realize his vision, his frustrations with a film industry that is disconnected from his country’s realties, and the limitations he faces when so many have left his country that are foregrounded most starkly. The film is not without its humour, with many a playful moment being intertwined with these heavier preoccupations, but the puckishness is infused with an ineffable melancholy that life in this world is not as it should or could be.
It’s this melancholy that focuses the latter question, with a major subplot involving the film Vasyanovych’s wife and daughter, who emigrated to Austria during the war and have not since returned. Vasyanovych treats this as a kind of betrayal to both himself and Ukraine as a whole, but there is also a tacit admission that his wife’s actions are not irrational or completely unjust. She moved to a place with better opportunities for herself and her child—what reasonable person wouldn’t do the same? But Vasyanovych cannot help but ponder what a Ukraine without its people would be like, and whether the titular “victory” he envisions against Russia is a hollow one if its citizens do not feel compelled to live on its soil. Ultimately for him, a geographically unified Ukraine is unified in name only unless its people have faith in its potential and work together to rebuild its identity.
There is still much more one can dissect from To the Victory! that even I haven’t broached in this review, but I will leave it for filmgoers to take on this thematically rich text for themselves. Needless to say, Vasyanovych has revealed himself to be one of Ukraine’s vital artistic voices this past decade, and To the Victory! only cements that distinction still further.
To the Victory! had its world premiere at TIFF in the Platform programme on September 7, 2025.
The Lonely Film Critic 