War as Afilmic Reality: Ukrainian Wartime Cinema and the Reshaping of Genre Conventions in the Streaming Landscape
War as Afilmic Reality: Ukrainian Wartime Cinema and the Reshaping of Genre Conventions in the Streaming Landscape

Summary/Abstract: The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began on 24 February 2022, has produced an unusual condition for film genre theory. A war of existential consequence is unfolding in near real-time proximity to its audiovisual representation, and Ukrainian filmmakers have been working inside that compressed temporal frame from the first weeks. This study examines Ukrainian wartime cinema released between 2022 and 2025 as a privileged site for thinking about the relation between afilmic reality and diegetic construction in the Souriau-Buckland model of filmic reality (Buckland 47), and proposes the analytical concept of emergency genre, a generic formation produced under conditions in which the temporal interval between event and representation, normally constitutive of genre crystallization, has effectively collapsed. The analytical procedure draws on five operationalized levels of the Souriau-Buckland model (afilmic, profilmic, filmographic, screenic, diegetic), applied to a corpus of fourteen feature documentaries and fictions. The corpus includes Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days in Mariupol (2023) and 2000 Meters to Andriivka (2025), Mantas Kvedaravičius’s Mariupolis 2 (2022), Maksym Nakonechnyi’s Butterfly Vision (2022), Roman Liubyi’s Iron Butterflies (2023), Ivan Ostrochovský and Pavol Pekarčík’s Photophobia (2023), Oksana Karpovych’s Intercepted (2024), Oleh Sentsov’s Real (2024), Maciek Hamela’s In the Rearview (2023), and Kateryna Gornostai’s Timestamp (2025). Each film is read at five levels, with attention to genre signals and to platform-mediated reception ensured by Ukrainian SVOD services (Megogo, Sweet.tv, Kyivstar TV) and by international platforms (Netflix, PBS Frontline, Dogwoof, MUBI, Apple TV). The analysis identifies five emerging configurations of the corpus, of which three are central: eyewitness urgency, embedded combat realism, and hybrid juxtaposition. Two further configurations, mosaic observation and pre-war fictional inversion, complete the typology. The study argues that under wartime conditions cultural and generic verisimilitude (Neale) become locally inseparable, and that the streaming layer reshapes their negotiation for distinct audiences. Limits and implications for further work on AI-mediated audiovisuality are discussed.

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