Billowing grey smoke intermingles with moody cloud cowl, whereas scores of grim-faced Ukrainian residents watch the skies, arms folded. The visible opening salvo of “Militantropos,” directed by Yelizaveta Smith, Alina Gorlova and Simon Mozgovyi, may very well be the opening scene of a Hollywood catastrophe film, albeit one of many extra dour and serious-minded types. Moments later, we’re at a practice station and the visible reference switches: Huddled plenty are being evacuated from Kviv to Vienna with their suitcases and youngsters. We’re organising a heartfelt interval drama, maybe. After which, in close-up, a bulldozer turns over rubble, and a household {photograph} is glimpsed within the particles, a tattered image of what has been misplaced.

The makers of “Militantropos” appear properly conscious of how the visible touchstones of struggle have been borrowed or appropriated by cinema, and their movie loops us again round once more, confronting us with the supply photographs. The neologism that provides the movie its title, coined for and by this movie, is outlined on-screen as “a persona adopted by people when coming into a state of struggle.” Such textual musings return periodically and are a part of a toolbox of methods aligning this doc with formally experimental work, regardless of ripped-from-the-headlines material which could lead you to anticipate a extra standard-issue strategy.

Written with Maksym Nakonechnyi, the director of the awful drama “Butterfly Imaginative and prescient,” “Militantropos” repeatedly considers the impact of struggle on kids. The bubble any guardian tries to construct for his or her baby is at all times short-term, because the phantasm that the world is for essentially the most half a benign and even magical place should inevitably be dismantled — however whether or not that dismantling is a regularly managed a part of rising up or the short and brutal consequence of occasions past the guardian’s management is introduced residence right here with vivid urgency.

A college the place kids have been compelled to remain, with paintings on the partitions — a few of that are regular children’ drawings and others of which depict bombings — provides a grounded sense of place to the horrific childhoods endured by younger Ukrainians. This movie’s anthropological curiosity in how individuals are formed by an ongoing immersion in a state of struggle is concurrently deeply personally felt and conveyed with a way of analytical take away. Maybe that’s partly the consequence of getting been directed by a bunch: There’s a steadiness and care right here that’s probably the consequence of collaboration and dialog between three director-editors also referred to as the Tabor Collective.

One imagines that a few of these conversations will need to have concerned the ethics of aestheticizing struggle. It’s definitely a related speaking level right here. Do stunning photographs of an unpleasant factor threat conferring some kind of palatability to that ugliness? It’s a really particular model of the age-old debate about whether or not cinema tends to glamorize what it depicts. Within the case of “Militantropos,” it issues quite a bit who’s doing the depicting: People who find themselves dwelling the truth of struggle over an prolonged time frame are arguably entitled to find magnificence the place they discover it. Hope springs in unlikely locations, together with in a grove of cherry blossoms that fill the display screen towards the top of the documentary.

Regardless of its aesthetic virtues, “Militantropos” finally captures the dreariness of navy engagement: the cold greys and muted khakis, the palette leached of all life and humanity. Crucially, when weapons fireplace and bombs detonate, the documentary eschews the language of cinema: The filmmakers don’t zoom in for a slow-motion shot of a person’s face grimacing as he dies. You possibly can’t at all times fairly inform what has occurred, and there’s no on-screen gadgets to assist orient us within the mission. There might not even be a mission, as the sensation of mindless intermittent destruction stays palpable all through “Militantropos.”