Under the Volcano [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Damian Kocur
scheda film] follows a Ukrainian family as their Tenerife holiday is cut short by the news of Russia’s invasion of their homeland. Polish director Damian Kocur, whose Bread and Salt [+leggi anche:
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trailer
intervista: Damian Kocur
scheda film] won the Special Jury Prize in the Orizzonti programme of the 2022 Venice Film Festival, presented his sophomore feature to Canadian audiences as part of this year’s Toronto Centrepiece programme. He talked to Cineuropa about his writing process and evocative approach to filmmaking.

Cineuropa: Under the Volcano is such an intimate film that sharing it with a big audience must feel very special. What were the first reactions like?
Damian Kocur: I think people were grateful. The Ukrainians, at least, that we made this film for and told that story for told us that it somehow recalled some of their personal feelings [about the beginning of the war] that they can still remember. Many people were saying, “Thank you!” because of the emotions they felt and called it “a heartbreaking film”. I kind of knew that already, when we were editing the movie, though.

How do you approach writing such an intimately emotional film?
I wrote from a feeling of helplessness and the feeling that I had to do something – not just making a movie. But then I realised that the only thing I can do in my life is to make movies. So, the script was an immediate reaction to what was going on in my country – Poland is just next to Ukraine, so we could see the terror in people's eyes on the streets. It happened relatively quickly: it only took about six months from writing to doing the initial street casting. I don't think cinema is the kind of medium that can react immediately to what is going on in a political or sociological way, because it always takes time to gather money and to find producers in order to make a film. It can never be an “article”, but it shouldn't be either. I was trying to make a kind of universal film.

So why Tenerife, in that case?
I went there twice, a couple of years ago, and I really liked it. Not because of tax reasons; it was a purely artistic decision but was also because of the volcano, which is pretty symbolic. And then during the writing process, I realised that when the war started in Ukraine, in February, there was also the biggest carnival in the world, happening in Europe. I thought, “This is amazing: those two things are happening at the same time!”

It's very characteristic of life, moving between opposite ends of the emotional spectrum all the time.
I think that both extremes exist at the same time. War is here and somewhere else, all the time. This one is visible because it's next to my country and next to Europe, and it’s in this kind of civilised world. But then, you know, life continues somehow, closer to what it was. Let’s say, after a couple of months already in Kyiv, you could see people having a nice time in a restaurant, while a couple of hundred kilometres away, people in the same country were fighting, suffering and dying.

I get the feeling that your work draws on a particular relationship between reality and fiction; is this the case?
I’m always trying to keep my eyes and ears open, and to follow the things I perceive to be truthful. What is written in the script, you can’t always film it. You can always photograph it. But my filmmaking is not about photographing the text, but rather going with the energy on set. With your crew, you're building a small world in which you are trying to capture a moment, to organise it, in order to shoot it, but the world is still moving around you. You have to be curious, sensitive and open so that you can also focus on what is happening around you, and then you can just jump in and out of that reality.