In the fall of 2022, Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of France’s most famous and polarizing public intellectuals, traveled to Ukraine for a series of visits along the fault lines of the Russian invasion. He witnessed bombed-out apartment buildings in Kyiv, where he had once met with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and where civilians were still liable to be awakened in the night by Russian blasts. He accompanied miners deep into the earth in Pavlograd, toured the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, joined the Ukrainian navy on a patrol outside Odesa, met with commanders of an international legion in a nondescript room whose only decoration was, inexplicably, a Big Mouth Billy Bass.
Such is the collage of lasting images captured in Slava Ukraini (“Glory to Ukraine”), Lévy’s documentary filmed over 10 trips to the country: devastating, resilient, admirable, often infuriating, sometimes surreal, at times relaxed and even a little funny. The 95-minute documentary, Lévy’s second film on the conflict, traces the three-month arc of the Ukrainian counter-offensive through many of the occupied eastern territories, from Kyiv to Bakhmut, Lyman, Izium, Kharkiv and Donbas, culminating with the liberation of Kherson in November.
