Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev won the Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. Documentary Competition at Sundance with this look at the difficulty and necessity of producing art in times of conflict.

Watching Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev’s visually confident, intellectually insecure documentary Porcelain War is like listening to a recitation from a brilliant poet while somebody sitting next to you is whispering what the poems are actually about. And the person sitting next to you explaining what the poet is trying to say is… twist… also the poet!

The documentary is the story of Slava (the co-director) and Anya, partners in life and in art. He makes porcelain objects — snails, reptiles, owls — and she covers their white surfaces with intricate and whimsical paintings. They live in Crimea, surrounded by artists and friends, but when the Russians attack, rather than fleeing their homeland, they go from the country into Kharkiv, a city just 25 miles from the Russian border.

The third (or fourth, if you count Frodo, which you truly must) member of their little society of artists in extremis is their longtime friend Andrey Stefanov, a painter who has turned his attentions to photography during the war, when he isn’t lost in thought about his wife and daughters, who fled to Lithuania.

The responsibility of the artist to continue to produce art in the darkest moments and the capacity of art to add beauty and levity in that darkness are just a few of the undercurrents in Porcelain War.

Art is, as the documentary makes clear and then repeats, in and of itself a rebellious act and an act of creation to ward off destruction. It’s hard to dispute this contention, and the directors and Stefanov, the documentary’s primary cinematographer, do a moving job of capturing the contrasts between the bucolic countryside and the rubble left in urban centers by Russian bombing.

But can war — at least from a defensive posture when what you’re protecting is your generational homeland and all you hold dear — be an act of creation and art? This is the complicated thesis that Porcelain War dances around while never necessarily committing to it.

The necessity of fighting back against the Russians is never in doubt for the furniture salesmen and dairy farmers Slava is training. And once rebellion is happening anyway, we see Anya painting one of their bomb-equipped drones.

That drones have become a crucial piece of documentary vernacular in the past decade is made clear in several shots in which the filmmaking drone is filming the war-making drones in action. That one is making art and the other is contributing to carnage (however righteous) is a conversation Porcelain War instigates without directly addressing. Perhaps the filmmakers are hoping to avoid questions of whether or not they explicitly view this as Ukrainian propaganda or just as a story.