The ‘Bad Lieutenant’ director’s latest, a non-fiction portrait of war and art, bowed out of competition at the Berlin Film Festival.

Ukraine may have bled out of the headlines in the U.S., apart from coverage of the recent farcical-tragic partisan fight over foreign aid for Ukraine in Congress. But the war is certainly not out of mind in Europe, and especially Germany, which shelters a significant number of Ukraine refugees and immigrants as well as many Russian expats.

A year on from Superpower’s premiere and two years into the war, Ferrara’s securing of an interview with Zelenskyy, which takes up about 10 minutes of screen time maximum, doesn’t seem much like a journalistic coup these days. The president, after all, is understandably keen to reach Western hearts and minds any way he can in order to keep sympathy and support flowing. (And who knows? Maybe he’s a big fan of King of New York and Bad Lieutenant.) Either way, Zelenskyy’s insightful words about the short-sighted folly of Russia’s invasion and awed praise for Ukrainians’ strength of character, expressed in English that gets more fluent every month, will do no harm to his reputation.

It’s a little bit personal for him given that his current wife, Cristina Chiriac, and their daughter Anna (both seen elsewhere in the film) are from Moldavia, a region that could be next on Putin’s to-invade list. “I’m an instinctual filmmaker, so I just felt I need to be here now, with my camera, in a humble way,” he explains to the journalist while the camera, operated by another, bobs and wobbles about like it’s strapped to a fly. Humble, yes, but also a little bit inept.

A similar, one-take-and-done approach is visible throughout as Ferrara and his small crew set out to interview a number of regular people on the streets about their experiences. There are never any subtitles revealing what destroyed city they’re standing in, or who is being interviewed, but perhaps that’s the price of being instinctual. For their part, the interviewees speak mostly calmly and matter-of-factly about how Russians invaded their streets, destroyed their homes or, as one woman explains with barely suppressed despair, vaporized buildings so thoroughly that there was nothing inside to be found; people were effectively wearing the dead as dust on their bodies. It’s not clear whether the shots of corpses in the streets are snippets of archive footage or were shot by Ferrara’s crew. Given the camera isn’t flaying around and stays in focus, I’m guessing they’re bits of archive footage.

Any yet somehow, thanks to edit suite magic (Leonardo Daniel Bianchi takes the editorial credit), some kind of thematic coherence emerges from the morass of material. The Ukrainians’ love for their children rhymes with the footage we see elsewhere of Patti Smith performing with her daughter Jesse Paris Smith, who plays the piano onstage with Patti. Near the end, she performs an a cappella version of “Wing,” a song she wrote for Jesse when the latter was a baby, in front of a crowd, and its words about how being free (“It was beautiful, it was beautiful,” go the lyrics) become a loving dirge for absent loved ones. Just to tie the Smith material closer to the Ukraine footage, we see the aforementioned child of Ferrara and his wife being entertained by Smith backstage before a gig; Smith apologizes for the fact that she only has water, peanuts and a little fruit to share with the kid.