Before territory falls, meaning is attacked.
Buenos Aires, April 2026. Ukrainian filmmaker Simon Mozgovyi arrived at BAFICI with Militantropos, a documentary co-directed with Yelizaveta Smith and Alina Gorlova that examines Russia’s invasion of Ukraine from a distance deliberately opposed to spectacle. Born in Kharkiv and shaped by experimental theater, Mozgovyi speaks not only as an artist, but as someone whose home, family and sense of time were fractured by war.
His central warning is severe: Russia seeks to capture minds before capturing territories. For Mozgovyi, culture, propaganda and historical narrative are not secondary fronts, but instruments of imperial expansion. The battlefield begins in perception, where aggressors try to persuade distant audiences that invasion is context, resistance is manipulation and victimhood is geopolitical theater.
Militantropos responds to that machinery through a different visual ethic. The film avoids the familiar grammar of war cinema: no exploitation of suffering, no dramatic slow motion, no direct consumption of pain. Instead, it observes civilians, rituals, evacuations and daily gestures under pressure, showing how war transforms the human being without reducing Ukraine to ruins or bodies.
That choice matters because global audiences are increasingly anesthetized by images of violence. Social media can turn atrocity into visual noise, while propaganda fills the fatigue with doubt, relativism and false equivalence. Mozgovyi’s documentary attempts to recover attention by slowing the gaze and restoring complexity to a reality often flattened by headlines.
The Latin American dimension is also significant. In regions historically shaped by dictatorship, forced disappearance and authoritarian manipulation, Ukraine’s struggle can find moral echoes beyond European borders. Mozgovyi points to deported Ukrainian children and the attempt to erase identity as part of a broader imperial logic that resonates with histories of state violence across the Global South.
The deeper argument is cultural: a nation survives not only by defending land, but by defending the meaning of its own existence. Russia’s war against Ukraine is also a war against memory, language, dignity and the right to be understood outside the aggressor’s narrative. In that context, documentary cinema becomes archive, testimony and counterintelligence.
What Mozgovyi offers is not a simple patriotic message, but a warning about how authoritarian power operates. Before bombs destroy cities, narratives prepare the world to tolerate destruction. That is why filming, remembering and naming the aggression become acts of resistance in themselves.
Detrás de cada dato, hay una intención. Detrás de cada silencio, una estructura.