BERLINALE 2020 - The Earth is Blue as an Orange

70th Berlinale Film Festival 2020

The Earth Is Blue As An Orange opens with a scene where a family scrambles about a decrepit house with a camera, a microphone and a clapperboard. They are making a movie. Not an amateur family video to be shared with friends on social media or confined to a drawer for eternity; what they are busying themselves with is cinema. They prepare the setting, rehearse the scene and record a few takes. And then, somewhere in the distance, a thunderous rumble is heard. And another one. And another. These clearly are not fireworks, but artillery shells and nobody seems affected by them. 

It then becomes clear that these people live in a war-zone. More specifically, they live somewhere in the Eastern Ukraine, which has been engulfed in a civil war for nearly six years now. For Anna and her children, this is the only reality they know. They dwell in a ruined house and try to survive in a destroyed and mostly abandoned city peppered with military checkpoints and occasionally shelled by either of the two sides of the smouldering conflict. It is apparent why Iryna Tsilyk, the documentary filmmaker behind the camera, chose to point her camera at this family: the pivotal and fundamentally therapeutic role cinema has played in their lives. 

These women are making their film not just to escape the brutal reality of living in a downtrodden wasteland ravaged by brutalities of war. For Myroslava, who eventually goes to study cinematography at a university, cinema is equivalent to a dimly lit candle of dreams, hopes and aspirations. It is also a way to document and share their struggle with the world at large, which seems to have completely forgotten about what’s going on in Eastern Ukraine. In fact, the filmmakers emphasize this point when they leave the war-torn region for a while and observe that relative normalcy can be found after spending a mere few hours on a train; figuratively speaking, it’s right around the corner. It is as though their precarious existence was completely invisible to the outside world.  

For these women, cinema is most importantly a therapeutic instrument. By focusing their energy squarely on re-enacting in stylized dramatic sequences, such struggles like hiding in a basement from bombs and artillery shells or filming their grandmother as she recounts in horrific detail the early days of the war, they are able to cope with these traumatic experiences. They are using escapist tools of moviemaking to make sense of the world around them. In addition, they treat Tsilyk’s own camera as a confessional through which they share the burden of their memories and experiences. They talk about the eerie normality of waking up in the middle of the night and running for cover or how, for them, war is synonymous with emptiness of abandoned houses and cities. And they do so with blood-curdling stoicism. 

It is abundantly clear that there is more to The Earth Is Blue As An Orange than meets the eye. It is an unnerving and purposefully frustrating portrayal of a war that’s happening literally next door and a beautifully poignant attempt to give a voice to people whose right to express themselves has been somehow taken away from them. Above all, it is a celebration of cinema and its magical powers composed into a seemingly straightforward yet inherently complex experiment that bridges the gap between reality and fiction. It is a kaleidoscope of meta-storytelling where truth, fiction and fantasy blur into one another. Thus, a new plane is created where the filmmaker, her subjects — who are filmmakers themselves — and their surroundings exist all together, interacting and manipulating each other with a common purpose of giving the horror of war a completely novel perspective: harrowing, yet ultimately life-affirming and hopeful.