TIFF Interview: Anastasiia Bortuali and Dmitrii Novoseltsev of “Temporary Shelter”

First-time filmmaker Anastasiia Bortuali just premiered her documentary Temporary Shelter at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival—aka TIFF—where I reviewed it. The movie follows her journey out of Ukraine after Russia invaded her homeland in early 2022. She, along with family members and compatriots, chose the island nation of Iceland as their destination, finding a strange—but, overall, welcoming—shelter from the ravages of war. Bortuali crafts compelling portraits of a people displaced, but not vanquished, finding equal parts heartbreak and wonder among the lava flows of their new residence. I had the chance to sit down with Bortuali and her (Russian) editor, Dmitrii Novoseltsev, in person at the festival, and here is that conversation, edited for length and clarity. When necessary, I have altered some of their phrasing to better fit into American idioms.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed: Most of the people in your film, though Ukrainian, speak Russian. What is your sense of how many Ukrainians grow up speaking Ukrainian vs. speaking Russian?  The languages are close, but not the same. I know, because I speak Russian and cannot understand Ukrainian nor read it, even if I can decipher some words and phrases. 

Anastasiia Bortuali: It has now started to be better. A lot of people have started to be interested in the Ukrainian language. Just as I have. All my life, I have spoken Russian and I studied in a Russian school in the Dnipro region. But when the war started, I became interested in the Ukrainian language and started to read Ukrainian books. And now, my Ukrainian is better, and for me it is really a pleasure to speak Ukrainian. When somebody speaks to me in Ukrainian, as some do in my film, I answer and speak to them in Ukrainian.

But my mother, for example, is 50 years old and is a very patriotic person, but she still speaks Russian, and in January, when we were in Lvov and someone spoke to her in Ukrainian, she answered in Russian. And I said to her, “Mom, maybe you could speak in Ukrainian? It’s not good! Show respect!” And she responded, “I’m shy! It’s hard for me. All my life, I’ve spoken Russian. What can I do?”

For people from the Soviet era—as are many of my characters in the film, who are the same age as my mother—the language issue can be quite complicated. They consider themselves 100% Ukrainian, but yes, they still speak Russian. For me, as a director and a person, I understand that this is a problem. All my life, I didn’t think anything about not speaking my native language, but now, I think it’s crazy. How can you be Ukrainian and not know your own language?

I studied in Poland, for example, and it would be hard to imagine Polish people not speaking Polish! But we need time. One part of my family started to speak Ukrainian once the war started. But within my family and with my friends, we don’t have conflict amongst ourselves over this. We speak what we speak, for now.

CLR: Speaking of the language issue, I found the story in your film about the Russian man born in Estonia to be really moving. He’s a man without a country!

AB: Exactly. For me, it was a very important moment, and I hope people will understand why it’s in the movie. This guy says that he speaks Russian and is ethnically Russian, and when I asked him why he didn’t get a Russian passport, he answered, “Why? I’ve never lived there.” So, Estonia was part of the Soviet Union, but it’s not Russian. He can speak Russian, but he’s not really Russian. It’s like the rest of us in the film who are Ukrainian but speak Russian. It’s part of history.

CLR: I’ve noticed that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, gives most of his speeches in Ukrainian.

AB: Yes, he does now. But before, there were a lot of jokes when he became president about him learning Ukrainian.

CLR: So, you leave for Iceland in 2022. Did you have other options than Iceland, or was that the only available destination?

AB: There were a lot of options. We stayed in Poland for 2 weeks—my mother, my sister, my aunt, my cousins, and I, with a 3-year-old boy—but we had a hard time finding consistent housing. It was so crowded! And then, I don’t know how my mom found this on Facebook, but she saw that Iceland had room. We also had the thought of going to Norway. But honestly, I don’t remember how we decided to go to Iceland, because we knew nobody there. And my mother does not like to go anywhere without my father. She’s very indecisive. But this time, she said, “Let’s go to Iceland.” (laughs)

And so we told ourselves that if we continued to have problems finding housing in Poland, we would go to Iceland. But then we kept putting it off one more day, because it was scary since it was so far away. Iceland … what will we do there? But we finally bought the tickets and came to Iceland. We also thought that the war would finish soon. We thought we might stay there for just a few months. It’s a very safe country. And we were also worried that Putin might go into Poland, as well. Some airplanes were in Polish airspace, and my mother was quite scared over this. So Iceland seemed safer.

CLR: Although, in your film, some people appear to be as afraid of Iceland’s lava flows as of the missiles. Which I thought was kind of funny.

AB: It’s true!

Dmitrii Novoseltsev: It’s actually crazy how people are moving from this condition to that condition. And this one woman left to go back to Ukraine because she was afraid. The stereotype about it being hard to live in Iceland is very interesting; volcanoes are erupting all the time, there are icebergs, polar bears are dancing everywhere. (laughs) But we had a lot of stories that didn’t make it into the finished film about how people just decided at the last minute to go to Iceland. It was sudden. They would say, “We were all set to go to Portugal, but at the very last minute, we found this program in Iceland and we changed the tickets.” Like, in the airport. So, it was that sudden. There was no plan.

AB: Yes, I remember.

CLR: Although Portugal sounds nice … I’ve been to Iceland, though, and it is beautiful. So, when did you decide to start documenting the experience?

AB: I started to shoot from the beginning, as soon as the war started. In Poland, I was also filming with my family. But it was just to preserve memories, really. Like a diary of sorts. But one man, a friend, would call me up and make a point to remind me that I was a director. And I would say, “You are crazy. There’s a war going on.” I thought that my professional life was over and I just needed to find a way to live like normal people. And he would say, “No. You must shoot it.” And then he said he would send me a letter of introduction to the director of the Icelandic Film Centre so that I could seek some technical support from them.

We would hang out in the common kitchen of the dormitory where we were housed, and I would film some of those conversations amongst ourselves, even if I was a little reluctant to film too much, though I would gather little excerpts here and there. Like a spy, I would just sit and listen and record. We were living on what used to be a NATO base, which is ironic because Russian propaganda claimed that the war was about preventing Ukraine from joining NATO, and here were a bunch of Ukrainians living on a NATO base! (laughs)

CLR: And how did you become involved in the film, Dmitrii?

DN: Anastasiia had been shooting for about half a year or a year …

AB: A year.

DN: So she had plenty of material when she approached me.

CLR: Did you two know each other beforehand?

DN: Yes. We had met before. She had been at a screening of the first film I had edited. It was a documentary feature film, What Beat You Nothing, that played at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. And Anastasiia liked the way I had edited the movie and thought that I could handle the different tones of the material.

AB: I actually tried to work with other people, first, and it was not so successful. They worked like typical editors, wanting direction of what to do exactly. Whereas Dmitrii is a much more creative editor. Very poetic.

DN: And I think that is the best way to approach this material, because it wasn’t a very linear story. We had to figure out what exactly was the basic narrative of the film. Because, you know, to make one more film about how some poor immigrants went somewhere … “Oh, poor guys! Blah-blah-blah …” It’s a little bit dehumanizing.

CLR: And there have been a lot of films like that.

AB: Exactly. And for me, it was so important, from the beginning, to not make a film about “poor refugees” who sit on the sofa and tell sad stories. Because I’ve seen films like this.

DN: It works, sometimes, but we wanted to really capture this sense of strange displacement, with people in bare feet standing on strange ground.

CLR: Can you explain your decision to hold on shots of Iceland while playing audio of missiles and bombs from back home?

AB: In the beginning, I told Dmitrii that I wanted to have a theme of PTSD and draw a line from the one experience to the other. And so I had the idea to play with dreams or something like this. It’s not well done, but something is done.

CLR: I wouldn’t say that. It can feel disjointed, but it often works.

AB: And Dmitrii helped me with the idea.

DN: One of the turning points in how we were going to approach this material was when we started thinking about how all these people coming over are suffering not only because this land is not ours but because they are having these flashbacks all the time. There is an airport near those NATO dormitories, and every time an airplane passes overhead, people are frightened.

AB: I was in Ukraine this past January and I visited my home, and afterwards, when I came back to Iceland, I would get up every night at 3am—like in a horror film (laughs)—and I would hear an airplane and I would not always understand where I was and that I was safe.

CLR: I’m so sorry that you have that PTSD. I’d like to thank you both for talking to me and I wish you all good things with the film! 

AB: Thank you so much!

DN: Thank you!