You Destroy. We Create review: exploring Ukrainian identity

This engaging immersive documentary focuses on a seldom-explored subject: the loss of cultural identity as a result of military invasions. More specifically, it’s about how the war in Ukraine has profoundly changed the country’s cultural institutions and the lives of artists. There’s an inspiring sense of community resilience in You Destroy. We Create; of spirits that refuse to be broken. It was filmed in Ukraine in August 2022, six months into the invasion, and runs for a well-paced 25 minutes, oscillating between 360 and 180 immersions. 

Directors Felix Gaedtke and Gayatri Parameswaran’s work sits alongside other VR experiences that spatialise historically important locations, several doing so in ways that look back onto history—for instance JFK Memento, Surviving 9/11 and Anne Frank House VR. The directors are also, like the subjects, painfully aware that this documentary belongs to a particular moment in time, bringing a sense of on-the-ground immediacy not found in those aforementioned experiences.

Some of the buildings captured in You Destroy. We Create are all but obliterated: formerly grand edifices reduced to rubble, steeped in melancholia and loss. Others, such as the first we encounter—the Museum of Eastern and Western Art—are still standing but caught at a grim impasse, the war rendering their future uncertain. In a large room in this museum, with the camera placed in a central position, we observe more than a dozen empty picture frames on the ground. Its Deputy Director, Kateryna Mikheitseva, reflects on the terribleness of not being able to influence the exterior situation, and of feeling “like the universe is crumbling under your feet.”

Mikheitseva explains that, after the bombing of Ukrainian cities began, a decision was made to hide and protect the museum’s artwork, moving it to a secret location out of the building. The next setting in the documentary is more lively, artistically speaking, because the art is conveyed in real-time by humans: this is the National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre.

Later in the runtime, the directors introduce a section exploring street art—another ordinary subject made extraordinary by the reality of war. We meet Gamlet Zinkivskyi, a giggling street artist who reflects on how war gave him a purpose in life, creating art and doing volunteer work for soldiers. “The benefit of me as a warrior, well, equals zero,” he says, explaining that he supports them by raising donations. 

Nothing about You Destroy We Create is especially innovative, but it’s well crafted and never dull. The directors appear to have learned from other 360 documentaries, creating a work that’s fluidly edited and visually engaging, and doesn’t require the viewer to make big adjustments to their gaze, concentrating on a visual zone of interest in front of us. Throughout the runtime the directors make a point, without directly stating it, that people and places are narratively linked: places tell stories, and stories belong to places. These places orient the experience—buttressed by the people we meet, and the terrible context in which we meet them.