“Clouds move with great speed” – or the naked truth of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the 2026 goEast Festival of Central and Eastern European Film6 min read
Among a wide range of spectacular movies from Central and Eastern Europe, the GoEast Film Festival 2026 screened the second documentary by Ukrainian film-maker and armed forces member Roman Ostrovskyi. Lossi 36’s South-East Europe Editor Riccardo Franceschetti reflects below on this raw, unfiltered testimony of what the reality of Russia’ war in Ukraine looks like for the civilians trapped in the situation.
Somewhere in Eastern Ukraine, a bulldozer is digging into the rubble of a building hit by a Russian missile. It tries to make its way among the debris, while a small group of villagers gather around what remains of the building to try and make sense of what just happened – which direction did the missile come from? Was the building still inhabited? Did anyone leave any valuables in there?
A man, alone against a louring sky, watches the rescuers at work, without a clearly intelligible expression on his face. He just asks them some simple questions:
– Will you guys manage to reach the cellar?
– If this is what remains of the top floors, that’s unlikely.
The man doesn’t react in any particular way.
At first it is not entirely clear, at least not to a naive mind that has never experienced a war, what exactly is going on. Then, as the rescuers find the first bodies under the devastated walls, one finally understands. The man’s family was hiding in the cellar when the missile struck.
It is with these pictures that director Roman Ostrovskyi closes his documentary, Clouds move with great speed – a raw, essential testimony of the life of the Ukrainians who have decided to remain in the country after the Russian invasion and now conduct their daily fight among airstrikes, land incursions, or just the cold of the winter. The documentary presents a most unfiltered portrait from the ground, showing the lives of the volunteers who make every possible effort to treat patients in the field hospitals or to evacuate the civil population from the areas that are likely to suffer from Russian strikes.
Ostrovskyi’s style is spare and terse, and this is precisely where his work’s strength lies. He shows three different stories (needless to say non-fictional ones) with little to no commentary and no explicit judgement for what he witnessed. The director does not provide his audience with a pietist display of the war, nor does he want to tell us what we already know. There is no need for that: the pictures speak for themselves, they tell a story of suffering, struggle and precarity, yet also of dignity, strength and resilience amidst a most delicate situation.
It is this composed, almost stoic posture that Ostrovskyi assumes in leading his audience through his documentary that manages to hit the mark. For if it is true – as art critic John Berger claimed back in the ‘70s – that the overwhelming flow of pictures delivered to us through mass media creates a sort of “visual saturation” that numbs our perception and inhibits our ability to empathise with others rather than strengthening it, then Clouds move with great speed is an extraordinary piece of reportage capable of reconnecting us with the people we see represented. It manages to succeed thanks to its simplicity.
Interestingly, this empathetic potential of the documentary is quite at odds with Ostrovskyi’s declared intention to exorcise the pain that everyday images of war cause to him by interposing a camera lens between his eyes and them. On the other hand, his audience feels extremely close to those scenes.
This is because Ostrovskyi is in no rush to unfold his stories. He does not have the presumption of giving a comprehensive picture of the state of the war, he doesn’t flood his audience with pictures, explanations, information – which would risk inducing that detachment, that impression of having to consider things from a bird’s eye view, as if a war was first and foremost a matter of rationality, gains and losses, and ultimately statistics. On the contrary, he lets silences speak by giving his pictures the right time to take their toll, while stories slowly develop and manage to do what words alone could never do.
The result is a documentary that truly resonates with its audience, producing a deeply touching portrait of the Ukrainian resistance. You can literally picture yourself in that situation – which is a quite disturbing yet moving experience. Most importantly, Ostrovskyi’s work goes beyond political narratives of the conflict and shows an intimate, deliberately personal perspective. In this framework, Ukrainians are not presented as heroes; yet what they do to defend their country – with their little available resources and in discouraging conditions – is heroic. By watching this documentary one easily understands how futile and shallow discussions on the war often are, just like some quick judgements – drawn from a distance – on the Ukrainians’ chances of winning the war or (especially from the far right and far left of the political spectrum) on NATO’s alleged threats to Russia that would “justify” the invasion. The different scenes of the documentary, the different stories it presents, all testify to the dramatic situation Ukrainians live every single day, alongside with the conscious choice they make in not looking away and – most importantly – to the price they have to pay for their strength.
For it is simple to just watch from afar, without ever having had to do what the people in this documentary do. These scenes almost feel like literary fiction at times, because we in the audience never had to pack all of our belongings in plastic bags, putting together decades of life in just a few minutes, to avoid a raid or being transferred to the nearest refugee camp. We never had to rush to a hospital and wonder if there were enough medics to help us. And – although not portrayed in the documentary – one wonders what is the fate of the Russian soldiers on the other side of the barricade, whose often forced conscription led them to also have to endure the nonsense and tragedy of this war.
Clouds move with great speed inevitably has us facing questions we don’t want to ask ourselves: what if I was the one on the stretcher, wounded by a grenade, and had to face a lack of medical personnel, or money, or possibly of clean tools to be operated with? What if I had to decide on the spot whether to leave my house forever or risk not seeing another day? Ostrovskyi’s work thus assumes universal value as a piece of testimony of the horrors men do to other men when at war: because – as Italian author Primo Levi said in much different circumstances – “if understanding is impossible, knowing is necessary”.
Clouds move with great speed (2025) was screened as part of the 2026 goEast Festival of Central and Eastern European Film.
