“Stay Online” is a Ukrainian experimental film in the screenlife genre

An experimental film was released “Stay online”. This is unusual for the Ukrainian film industry in the format of a director’s screen life Eva Strelnikova. The tape began to be shot immediately after the deoccupation of Kyiv region in the summer of 2022. And she tells about the beginning of the occupation of Kyiv region. Already in October of the same year, it was shown to the audience. Since then, the film, according to the producer Anton Skripetswere refined and prepared for the big premiere.

UP. Culture already watched the screen life “Stay Online” at the premiere and tells how the film has changed since the first idea, who might like the film, and who definitely shouldn’t watch it.

Format for horror and the great war

Before the full-scale invasion, director Eva Strelnikova shot mostly Russian-language TV dramas, or teasers/trailers for TV shows like “Everybody’s Dancing.” Immediately after the invasion of Russia in 2022 together with the producer Anton Skripets decided to take on “a movie about the war during the war”.

An unusual format was chosen for the upcoming film – screen life. In it, all the viewer sees on his screen is a picture from the gadgets of the film’s characters: together with them, he browses files, conducts searches on the Internet, makes video calls. The format, which was born around the 2010s and reached its peak in the quarantine years of 2020-2021, was mostly used for thrillers and horror.

Usually, horror films cause fear, disgust, shock, and other sensations in the viewer that you cannot find in normal life. As psychologists say, the horrors created on the screen help viewers overcome anxiety and realize the safety in which they are. In “Lyshaysya Online”, the shootings of civilians by Russians in the Buchi, Irpen, and Borodyanka regions are reproduced quite naturalistically, up to the point of recognizing the locations, on the screen.

Unfortunately, the first viewers did not manage to watch the premiere of “Leave Online” in the capital’s “Oscar” cinema – the air alarm and the threat of ballistics forced the audience to rush to the nearest shelter.

The superhero disappears

Newly created at the end of June 2022 Volodymyr Borodyanskyi (former Minister of Culture and head of Pinchuk StarLightMedia media holding) community Association of Ukrainian producers announces: “A war drama with elements of fantasy is being filmed in Ukraine“. About the shooting of the first feature film in Ukraine since the February 24 invasion informs even The Hollywood Reporter.

Producer Anton Skrypets then toldwho started working on the film in the second or third week of the Great War.

“At that moment I had a wild need to talk about it. And it so happened that it coincided with the same need in Anton Skripets, who, in addition, had a clear idea of ​​how exactly we can talk about it“, – confessed in the fall of 2022, directed by Strelnikova.

Initially, the tape was supposed to be called “The Day I Met Spider-Man” and tell “the story of Katya, a volunteer who felt a superpower in herself“. Before the full-fledged Ukrainian premiere, the path to which continued through test screenings, the world premiere at the Montreal festival and a screening at the “Youth 2023” festival, the film had absolutely no elements of the promised fiction, and it itself is from a war drama quickly turned into a thriller about war.

Now “Stay Online” tells the story of the girl Katya (Elizaveta Zaitseva), which due to the beginning of the invasion is in a depressed state and loses motivation. For a few hours, she has a laptop that was given to the needs of the army. In it, Katya has to install her brother Viti for the TRO unit (Alexander Rudynskyi) required program. The account of the previous owner, Andriy, remains active in the laptop (Roman Lyakh)so Katya learns that while evacuating Buchi, he was forced to part with his young son Sava (Gordiy Dzyubynskyi). And disappeared.

The plot is close to millions of Ukrainians who were forced to flee the war in the first days of the invasion. Or to those who could not find relatives in the occupied cities or on the front line. Or to those who lost their loved ones in the forests of Kyiv, who signed up for the landfill with the first explosions.

The film team spins up emotions to the maximum: here it seems that one of the main characters is wounded under fire, here the boy finds hope for a meeting with his parents, here is a memory from the carefree pre-war New Year 2021, here one of the heroes dies at the hands of the Russians. And all this is “live” – ​​that is, on the big screen. Some viewers of the film told me that they needed a reminder of those events and the moment when war changed our normalcy.

“The film is emotionally heavy. …This story reminded me of how two years ago I supported my sister and nephew online who were under occupation in Buchi. I constantly held my phone in my hands and looked to see if they appeared online. Online means alive“, the viewer Alina shares her impressions.

She recalls that the day when her family managed to get out of the occupation was one of the happiest in her life. However, he admits that they should not watch the tape: “For people who lost a family member or friend in this war, or experienced a similar horror, I would not advise watching this film, so as not to traumatize yourself even more“.

Strelnikova and writer Andrii Kokotyusa liked the film. He means it as an action-packed war drama and psychological thriller and believes that “it’s a really well-made movie.” “Yes, about the beginning of the great war. Yes, they were crying in the hall, and the woman next to me was not ashamed to change napkins. But these are my tears too. These are the tears of March 2022. When you wanted to act, but felt your own helplessness“, he recalls.

“It is really very traumatic, brings to the surface all painful memories– the viewer Yuliya agrees, – although we must give credit to the authors, who try to extinguish this trauma with comic situations thanks to the skill of Olesya Zhurakivska, Oleksandr Yarema, Oleksandr Rudynskyi. At the same time, at the expense of naturalistic scenes (admit it to yourself, you absolutely calmly look at the corpses of Russian soldiers on social networks!) he immerses us in the reality in which we live. The constant change of frames and well-chosen soundtracks prevent the first time from seeing the mistakes and illogicalities that the authors made – I saw only a few, but I didn’t even have time to think about them“.

Among the first viewers of the tape – marketing director of MEGOGO Valeriya Tolochyna. She notes that the chosen format may suit Ukrainian wartime cinema. “The film made a positive impression on me precisely because of the format. And I sincerely hope that “Stay Online” will give a new impetus to the development of screen life in our market. The format allows telling stories quickly enough and on a budget, which is extremely relevant for Ukrainian cinema today“, Tolochyna is convinced.

The excess of horrors played on the screen, emotional breakdown, as well as production flaws can be taken as a coherent statement about this war. However, for a large part of the audience, the risk of retraumatization may be hidden in such a movie – a new living of a traumatic experience or event.