Black Sunflowers: The rave doc that became a portrait of wartime Ukraine
“A couple of images coming out of Vietnam really helped change the course of public opinion about the war,” says music video and feature-film director James Marcus Haney. “Now you have so many gnarly images coming out of Ukraine every day, sitting next to pictures of cool recipes, and Jeffrey the raccoon or whatever his name is. It becomes nothing. If Kyiv gets enough missiles into it, maybe it’ll be a headline. But do those headlines register anymore? Probably not.” That harsh reality became the driving force behind Haney’s new documentary, Black Sunflowers, which follows a cross-section of young Ukrainians whose adolescence has been consumed by war.
The story started four years ago, just weeks after Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine. Haney – who previously worked in the music industry and as the tour photographer for Mumford and Sons – found himself in Kyiv on a photography dispatch from NGO Warchild. It just so happened that Haney’s translator on that trip was also a dedicated techno raver in the city. “I was like, ‘What’s happening in the rave world? Is that life being lived still? How is it being lived?’,” recalls Haney. “That was the original seed question that started this whole project off.”
Black Sunflowers charts Haney’s trips to the region over the following four years, initially focused on Kyiv’s warehouse rave scene (which, in reality, was actually day parties to get around curfew restrictions) but gradually evolving into a chilling portrait of people aged under 22 in the region. The film is told in a series of parallel threads: a draft-dodger racing his car on the outskirts of the city; a boyfriend pleading with his girlfriend not to join the army; a soldier raving while he rehabilitates his amputated leg; and so on. Each attempt to navigate the strange reality of wartime existence in the best way that they can.
“You have an entire generation who, at the beginning of COVID, were basically children, and the pandemic took away the years when their adolescence is meant to take place,” explains Haney of his decision to focus explicitly on young people in the film. “Then they get out of COVID and Russia invades, so they go straight to adults overnight. Immediately they’re forced to choose between a rifle, a tourniquet, or shame.”
This idea of lost adolescence also lends the film its name. Sunflowers are the national symbol of Ukraine – with the flag itself, stories tell, representing a field of sunflowers under a blue sky – and, in peacetime, sunflower seeds and oil were one of the region’s biggest exports. Post-invasion, however, these fields of yellow and green have been peppered with Russian mines, preventing farmers from harvesting their crops and leaving them to turn black on the stalk. Quite literally, a generation dead in the field.
But Black Sunflower’s focus on young people also performs a second function – it’s profoundly relatable. “Speaking to these young people I was like, ‘Damn, they’re just like me’; they listen to the same music, and they’re more up on American memes than I’ll ever be in my life,” says Haney. “But then they’re suddenly putting on fatigues and helmets and killing Russians. That age range – 18 to 24 – was such a definitive time of my life. This film needs to put foreigners in their shoes, have this reflection of ‘Oh, wow, that’s us’, because the news outlets aren’t doing that.” A particular low point in the film comes with the broadcast of Ukrainian President Zelensky’s visit to the Oval Office in early 2025, where JD Vance and Trump roundly humiliate him in front of a global audience. “The world’s forgotten about Ukraine,” Haney concludes solemnly.
Indeed, beneath its rich storytelling, above all, Black Sunflowers is intended to motivate action. It’s this value that has led Haney to assemble a star-studded cast of musical collaborators for the film’s soundtrack (including Fred Again.. and Brian Eno, Sega Bodega, Aphex Twin, Idles and more), as well as executive production from three-time Oscar winner Sean Penn. “He’s been heroic,” Haney gushes of Penn’s involvement. “He’s been to Ukraine 11 times since the full-scale invasion, and was given the highest national honour by Zelensky just one month ago. We managed to get the film in front of him and he just said, ‘Whatever I can do to help, let me know’. He’s been able to knock down so many barriers we couldn’t get through.”
Haney’s tireless dedication to the Ukrainian cause seems to at least partly emerge from the sheer destruction he’s witnessed on the front line these past few years – but one memory stands out above all. It took place after a nail-biting film scene in which Haney finds himself in a bunker with four Ukrainian soldiers, hunkered down under heavy Russian bombardment. At some point, they begin watching a six-month-old iPhone video depicting their squad celebrating a successful tour over dinner, but, perplexingly, Haney’s bunker mates looked sad. “Suddenly it dawned on me and I asked, ‘How many of you are still active now?’,” Haney recalls. “They responded ten – not six months later, out of the 70 in that video, 60 of those soldiers were either dead or wounded. That really fucked me up. It felt like they were simply in a mode of: kill as many Russians before they get killed.”
Having come to personally identify with the film’s fledgling characters and watch them dance so close to the line across its two hour runtime, then, the natural question is: where are they now? “It’s funny, when we started screening the film for close friends, everyone said, ‘You gotta put an update at the end of the film!’,” responds Haney. “I’m like, ‘This is the update!’ Everyone’s in the same shithole. The only update is Sophia did join the third brigade against her boyfriend’s wishes. Everyone else is still stuck in this pattern of life.”
Black Sunflowers debuts at Toronto International Film festival today. Check out the gallery above for a peek inside the film.
