Rock, Paper, Scissors

A young man is playing this game with a younger boy in what looks like a makeshift hospital where a solitary doctor is trying to tend to the wounds of many casualties. It transpires that they are awaiting a truck to take them to somewhere possibly safer, but when "Ivan" (Oleksandr Rudynskyy) goes outside to reconnoitre he sees a Russian war plane blow it to smithereens. Their radio contact informs him that there are enemy soldiers close by and so taking a rifle from one of the other casualties he sets off to protect them all. He finds, though, that seeing a man through his gunsight and actually pulling the trigger are two completely different matters, and in the end - with so much of the battle being fought remotely from the skies, would killing them make any real difference to their plight? The effort from Rudynskyy, his character barely a man himself, is touching and the sentiment of the piece palpably tugs at your heart-strings as does the bleakness, almost moon-scale nature, of their medical hole in the ground. It's set in Ukraine but serves as a much more depressing indictment of warfare in general.

This film is about one small episode of the war in the east of Ukraine. It starts with the kids game " stone, paper, scissors" like a metaphor for everyday life of Ukrainians, who will never know what happened the next moment. Actor has played magnificent role, he shows the bravery, disappointment, courage, and dignity. His character is a real person, real guy who has lived through the horror of desperation, idea of talking to enemy with the possibility to be killed just to save his family and other people. And his character stands human despite having a gun he couldn't shoot into the other human, just couldn't.

I strongly recommend to watch the film and to try to understand in what horror we, Ukrainians, are living everyday because of invasion.