Moved to action by Ukrainian playwright Olena Astasieva’s personal account of the horrors and absurdities of navigating daily life during the initial weeks of the Russian war in Ukraine, Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War from actor and filmmaker Leah Loftin presents five poignant metaphoric vignettes, each offering a distinct style, voice and experience of the war. The short is a mixed media documentary that captures your attention through its use of a mirrored multilayered representation of how everyday moments are shattered into unrecognisable realities. Astasieva, now living in exile, remained in close collaboration with Loftin throughout the adaptation, and her wish to express those early moments of pain and disbelief to a much wider audience beyond the depersonalised mass media coverage is clear. In support of Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War premiering on DN today, Loftin speaks to us about maintaining the sense of humour she felt in the original work, creating an English narration to make the film as relatable to Western audiences as possible and shaping the edit around the rhythms she found whilst first performing the text on stage.
How did you become aware of Olena’s piece and come to adapt it into a short film?
I am an actor in New York and I was invited to perform Dictionary of Emotion in a Time of War, originally written as a one-woman play, at a series of fundraisers to support Ukrainian refugees and the war effort. I could not seem to shake the power of Astasieva’s words and how they illuminated a searingly visceral and extraordinarily personal depiction of the war that stood in contrast to what we were seeing across the media at the time. I was already in close communication with Astasieva and the moment she agreed to the idea of adapting it into a short film, I grabbed the DSLR camera that was sitting on my bedside table (a Canon 5D Mark IV) and immediately went down to my basement to begin setting up the first shot.
The form of Astasieva’s text is unconventional and profoundly poetic in its depiction of a sudden war, and it was satisfying to push forward with an ultra bare-bones approach.
I felt such a pressing urgency as I was creating this film, and knew that I did not have time to fundraise, assemble a proper crew, rent equipment, and operate under traditional timelines. The form of Astasieva’s text is unconventional and profoundly poetic in its depiction of a sudden war, and it was satisfying to push forward with an ultra bare-bones approach to shooting the film that seemed to echo the immediacy and urgency found within the text.
Were there any specific procedures that you put in place to ensure the authenticity of the piece?
We were in touch long before I began the film, and I continued to stay in very close communication with her throughout the process of adaption. One day, after she had generously answered a lengthy list of very specific questions about the nuances of her life before and during the war, she offered me her diaries. I was thrilled. After a very rough translation of them from Russian, I was able to gain a much deeper insight into the textures of Olena’s world, both internal and external, that extended beyond the well-crafted text of Dictionary of Emotions. The diaries felt like such a gift: all of the details of Olena’s daily life were a very pivotal point in the creation of the film’s aesthetic. For me, that was the moment when the film came alive visually. It was after that first night when I read her diaries in full that I created the graphic montage image that is animated during the title sequence and serves as the key art for the film. That same night, I created the storyboards for the animated title sequence of the film, which is filled with visual representations of many of the nuances of her life, such as the taping up of her windows to prevent shattering during bombings, to the textural representations of her day-to-day life.
Your passion for visualizing the text is obvious. How did you decide on this multidisciplinary approach to convey her situation?
The text is structured in a very unique way, presented in a series of vignettes, each entitled by words that describe emotional and personal situations experienced since the onset of the war: Fear, Hunger, Love, Cleaning, Guilt. Within her testimonials, there was horror and anger and fear, but there was also hope and resilience, along with an astonishing dose of wit. It was very clear to me that Astasieva’s words needed to be the anchor of the film in voice-over narration, and I had a very specific multidisciplinary aesthetic in mind for the visual style that was inspired by my internal experience actually performing the piece on stage live, staged-reading-style. The film ultimately incorporates illustration and animation, studio art installations, archival footage, contemporary war photography, along with fragmented recreations of narrative scenes. My primary concern was to create a strong visual companion to support the structure of Astasieva’s powerful testimonial, illuminating her intent that “Americans and Europeans understand what it felt like when bombs started falling on our heads.”
The often disparate cinematic and tonal styles of the vignettes evoke Olena’s fractured, vacillating emotional state in the midst of war.
For example, for Love, I felt that section was begging to be illustrated. It is such a surprise to have the intricacies of a new relationship in discussion within a piece about war. The exhilarating, fervent sensations are still there, even if your town is getting bombed. Love needed to have a particular vividness that expressed this romanticism and it was so beautifully illustrated by the artist Aura Lewis. On the other hand, the text of Hatred is quiet and steadied in tone on the subject of bombing. Talking to Olena, she told me that in the first days of the attacks, she felt like she was “living in an old war movie.” I knew that I really wanted to use archival war footage for this section. I found footage of this massive mid-century aircraft gliding in mid-air, bombs slipping out of its weapons bay so smoothly and eerily, a serene threat in its silent assault. I also found a collection of footage from atomic bomb tests in the 1950s, where the camera was placed inside the home to capture the devastation of explosions from this point of view. It felt particularly horrifying to view such violence in the domestic interior. For me, the often disparate cinematic and tonal styles of the vignettes evoke Olena’s fractured, vacillating emotional state in the midst of war. It often borders on the absurdist in its relentless barrage. Yet, these vignettes are ultimately unified through the consistent use of voice-over, as written by Olena and performed by me in English.
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How did the limitations of no crew or budget influence your creative decisions?
I needed to work fast, and working solo gave me the freedom to shoot whenever I needed to and allowed me to be flexible. It allowed me to be able to quickly re-shoot a sequence I was unhappy with or set up a new art installation in my basement and shoot through the night if needed. It eliminated some logistical pressures, to be sure. My background is in the theatre, where we are trained in all areas of production (from painting sets to costume design to rigging lights) so this approach feels very natural to me.
The miniatures are gorgeous. Are they something you had already or made specifically for the film?
I constructed all the miniatures in the Cleaning scene by hand, combining original and pre-fab dollhouse elements to build the structure of the kitchen, and then built out the details of the interior. This was the most time-consuming of the vignettes to complete but I loved it and found the process to be meditative. Going back to my decades working in theater, handcrafting specific design elements is always a vital part of the creative process for me (in a new film I’m currently working on, I am handcrafting several historical reproductions of objects from the 18th Century). In this film, where I was aiming to convey a stark reality through varied modes of constructed artifice, the physical process of creating objects at once real and imagined was an especially meaningful one for me.
I was struck by the sense of absurdity that was within so many of the vignettes, a tone that made the shock, fear, sorrow, and anger all that more resonant.
The scene with the beautiful shots of bread stands out to me as playful and so lush which obviously juxtaposes the horror of the situation. How did you ensure that the humour and wit didn’t undermine the gravity of the subject matter?
When I first read Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War what surprised me the most was the tone. It had a frank, clear-eyed awareness of the ironies of the situation amidst all the surrounding chaos and horror. I was struck by the sense of absurdity that was within so many of the vignettes, a tone that made the shock, fear, sorrow, and anger all that more resonant. I really wanted to capture this within the film, and I was led completely by Olena’s tone throughout. There is a particular wit and sense of deep-rooted resilience throughout the piece that I find echoing in so many of my Ukrainian friends, and it was very important to me that this tone was represented in the film. All of these horrific things were happening to Olena, her city was getting bombed, her friends were evacuating and there were so many unknowns, and yet often her response is humor. I found something so poignant in this impulse to make a joke at the irony of a situation when faced with staggering trauma.
Do you think the fact that you are American adds weight to the film?
This was a very big decision that had to be made at the beginning of the process. Should the voiceover narration be spoken in Ukrainian or English? This was made even more complicated by the fact that Olena wrote the original text in Russian. As a result of the war, the spoken language of Ukrainians has become an extremely polarized issue. Olena and I discussed this decision at length. Her intention was to have an English translation of Dictionary of Emotions to be heard by Western audiences. Olena was very concerned with the Russian propaganda that was infiltrating Europe and the US at the time – she felt presenting the text in the English language was the most direct way to cut through any barrier of separation and identification.
We wanted to cut against this tendency, to remove language barriers, and allow Western audiences to experience Olena’s testimony directly from her point-of-view.
Through mass media, there can be a tendency to view victims of war as ‘other’, removed from one’s personal experience and reality. We wanted to cut against this tendency, to remove language barriers, and allow Western audiences to experience Olena’s testimony directly from her point-of-view. At our most recent screening at Harvard CAMLab, a woman in the audience commented in the Q&A that this was the first film about war she had seen that allowed her to feel that the same situation could happen to her, in her own life, at any moment.
Given the predominantly solo production executed alongside the structured text, how was the editing process?
The rhythms of the edit were very much informed by the movements of the text that I experienced in my theatrical performances. I vividly remember how dynamic the pacing felt when performed in front of a live audience, and I really wanted to honor this emotional cadence in the edit. Like so ma ny elements of this film, the edit was dictated by the internal structure of each of the vignettes. Each section was its own entity and retained an individual rhythm. Full disclosure: I learned to edit on this film. There was a lot of Googling and watching of editing how-to videos when I was faced with technical snags. I think that this is such a great moment in time to be a new filmmaker, as there are so many amazing resources out there to learn about the technical side of filmmaking.
She was compelled to do this as a personal way to process the often baffling complexities of the situation, and for people around the world to “Understand the emotions that Ukrainians felt when bombs started falling on our heads.”
The film raises the question of what role art should play in times of war. How do you see Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War contributing to the broader conversation about war?
Last year, Olena sent a message for me to read to the audience during the post-screening discussion of the film that I feel is particularly relevant to this discussion: “Thank you for watching this movie. I know that many people are tired of the news about Ukraine. Unfortunately, the war continues. I know that art cannot stop war. But words matter. Actions matter. Even the smallest actions have an impact.”
What role should art serve to represent war? Olena’s impulse was to create this written piece of art, an urgent testimonial made in real time. As a middle-aged artist who finds her world under sudden attack, her immediate reaction was to write, resulting in an eloquent record of her experience. She was compelled to do this as a personal way to process the often baffling complexities of the situation and for people around the world to “Understand the emotions that Ukrainians felt when bombs started falling on our heads.” In turn, I was so deeply moved by her work that I felt an urgent need to share her testimonial through the medium of cinema. As both a reader and performer of Dictionary of Emotions, I felt a pressing urgency to create the next iteration of Olena’s original work. She both needed to express herself through her art and desperately wanted to be sure that that world would not turn away. Olena Astasieva continues to live in exile, and she is among the millions of Ukrainians displaced as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She continues to write.
With so many skills and your background, what are you working on next?
My current film project centers on 18th century medicinal cures found in the New York Hudson Valley region. A micro-opera, it is also my first foray shooting on film, a Beaulieu 4008, which has been thrilling. I recently completed an animated adaptation of an illustrated children’s book on the United States Constitution, but considering recent political events, certain revisions are now essential. And on the acting side, I just finished shooting a role in my first installment of Richard Linklater’s latest film project, Merrily We Roll Along, a decades-spanning Sondheim adaptation.
