Toronto Hidden Gem: Following a Wartime Government in Real Time in Ukraine Doc ‘Defiant’

Alex Ritman
·4 min read
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Karim Amer has made documentaries about seismic geopolitical events as they unfolded before. In the Oscar-nominated documentary The Square — which he produced — footage of the chaos and carnage in Cairo’s Tahrir Square helped offer an uniquely immersive account of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011.

But nothing he’d made previously compares to Defiant, premiering in Toronto on Sep. 9 and capturing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine from the unique perspective of key decision makers in Kiev — including minister of foreign affairs Dmytro Kuleba — politicians suddenly and unexpectedly thrust into a wartime government.

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“The stakes are so high, because it’s the largest conflict we’ve seen since WWII and anything could happen,” says Amer, who swapped his producer hat for director, teaming up with longtime producer Mike Lerner (The Square, Hell and Back Again) and Odessa Rae, a newly-minted Oscar-winner for Navalny.

Access is absolute key for a film like Defiant, which started moving when, not long after Russia launched its invasion on Feb. 24 2022, Amer was introduced to peace negotiator (and Ukraine’s incoming defence minister) Rustem Umerov, then on his way to meet the Pope with the hope of getting his support.

“Rustem is a Crimean Tatar who’s Muslim, and I just felt like here’s a Jewish president (Volodymyr Zelenskyy) sending a Muslim guy to meet the Pope, this is crazy, I gotta go with you. So I just booked a ticket to Rome and hoped I would get any kind of ability to film with him,” he says. “Of course, it didn’t work. But it kind of showed them we were serious and interested. I think when you find people in the midst of history and they offer you a seat in their caravan, it’s tempting not to take it.”

From there, trust was built, with Amer and the two producers heading to Ukraine to play what Lerner describes as “three-dimensional chess” as they followed various characters and the unfolding story of the war. With so many moving parts, they also had to consider the structure and angle of the documentary they wanted to make.

“I knew we didn’t want to do the frontline story, that’s not our place. And we weren’t going to make the pure humanist film about the people of Ukraine,” says Amer.

“So we felt that, as outsiders, the role we could play best was to tell the story of what this war meant to the world, who were the people who were at the tip of the speak in the communication and management of that relationship?”

With this loose premise in mind, the Defiant team set out to capture these figures as they invented, in real-time, what Amer describes the “modern day war playbook,” dealing with diplomacy and disinformation and — crucially — trying to showcase to the world the tyranny Ukraine was facing in order to get the necessary support.

And the figures in Defiant, he explains, have an “extraordinary ordinariness” to them, members of a civilian government now at war. Such a “humanising” quality helped show how this could happen anywhere.

“To me, this is a face-off between two operating systems of the world,” he says. “Either you go into the Putinist model, which is a return to the big man with no civil society, no institutional power and  everything is ‘might makes right,’ or we have a kind of pluralistic republic. We’re witnessing a high-stakes poker game where Putin called the world all in. Does the UN mean anything? Do international borders mean anything? Do treaties mean anything?”

Of course, Putin’s high-stakes poker game is still very much ongoing with no sign of the war coming to end end anytime soon. In the world of documentary filmmaking, at least, this doesn’t exactly help when it comes to finding a natural conclusion (indeed in The Square, Amer and his filmmakers had to add extra elements as political chaos erupted again in Cairo a year later).

But a “natural arc” was found with Defiant, which begins in Feb. 2023 with Ukrainian minister Kuleba telling the world what’s about to happen and U.S. president Joe Biden saying that his country has just a couple of weeks to survive. By the end of the film, Biden explains to Kuleba that they’re going to win with the U.S.’ backing, with the film detailing what happened between these two moments to change this attitude.

As Lerner explains: “The fact is that Ukraine is winning the war. It obviously hasn’t won it, but it’s winning, and there’s only one reason for that, and that’s because they persuaded the world to help them.”

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