The burial prohibition in Rostislav Kirpičenko’s Spring makes a Ukrainian Orthodox priest confront an authority familiar from Sophocles: a ruler who believes his jurisdiction extends to the dead. Andriy must store civilians’ bodies for the Russian forces occupying his town, keeping them from relatives until they can be consigned to mass graves.
He secretly returns them to their families. The resemblance to Antigone is precise, yet the difference matters. Where Antigone acts for her brother, Andriy’s obligation reaches across a community. His religious office makes strangers’ grief his responsibility, and every body returned becomes a breach of military discipline.
Reading this Ukrainian situation through Greek tragedy helps identify what the occupiers are trying to destroy. A funeral acknowledges relationships that survive the killing: someone remains a parent, a spouse, a neighbor. Preventing that acknowledgment lets military power dictate the civilian’s identity after death.
Andriy’s resistance restores the family’s claim to a person the army has reduced to something awaiting disposal. The film is strongest when this argument stays attached to the work involved. Bodies require shelter, concealment, transport, and ground that will receive them. An ethical commitment creates immediate practical difficulties.
Kirpičenko approaches Ukraine through a biography that crosses several borders: born in Lithuania, raised in Ukraine, later studying in Paris. His predominantly Lithuanian cast and crew, with Ukrainian actress Anastasiia Pustovit among the performers, make Spring an act of regional representation carried across languages and national origins.
That proximity deserves attention without becoming a certificate of authenticity. The film itself offers the firmer ground for judgment: Orthodox responsibility, domestic deprivation, and military intrusion give its occupation a particular social texture. The classical comparison explains the struggle over burial; it cannot account for all the ways these people inhabit it.
Andriy’s clerical identity is initially withheld, a useful decision that allows his relationships to precede the authority of his clothing. Living with the young married couple Tanya and Vassya, he participates in an intimacy that needs little verbal explanation. Kęstutis Cicėnas gives the priest a restrained presence suited to someone whose obligations leave scant room for declarations.
The economy of these exchanges makes the household feel established before the film asks us to fear for it. Andriy’s care for the dead then develops from conduct already visible among the living, giving his resistance a human basis beneath its religious significance.
Captain Igor’s convictions operate through a different relationship to power. Putin’s announcement of the invasion accompanies the film’s opening, supplying the political language behind the captain’s belief in his mission. Daumantas Ciunis combines that certainty with drinking and an appetite for domination.
The parallel between soldier and priest has dramatic value because conviction sustains both men, though the consequences are radically unequal. Andriy’s faith places demands on himself. Igor’s authorizes demands on everyone around him. The film finds something disturbing in his dependence on the very authority he exercises, even if it sometimes treats ideological certainty as a sufficient explanation for cruelty.
The tavern scene makes that cruelty socially legible. Igor beats and humiliates Vassya while the other customers remain silent. The violence establishes his command over a room, and the witnesses’ fear helps maintain it. Occupation becomes a set of altered relationships among people who might otherwise speak, intervene, or simply share a public place.
Here Ciunis has concrete behavior through which to express the captain’s character, rather than having to embody the invasion as an abstraction. The scene’s familiarity as wartime drama matters less than its attention to the enforced passivity surrounding the assault.
Outside these encounters, Vilius Mačiulskis’s photography gives winter an obstructive physical presence. Night and weak daylight restrict visibility; available light catches bodies and faces without making the surrounding darkness feel safely empty. Distant military sounds merge with the wind, keeping the front outside the immediate frame while denying the town any separation from it.
This is an effective way to preserve the civilians’ restricted perspective. They hear forces they cannot inspect or control. The frozen ground creates an equally severe limit: Andriy can continue accepting responsibility for the dead after the ordinary means of fulfilling it have disappeared.
The church setting also gives the images a religious vocabulary, reinforced by the organ in Sten Sheripov’s score. As the music expands, the dead acquire the weight of communal mourning that military orders have forbidden. Yet the film’s visual and musical solemnity can become too directive.
Shadowed faces, sacred surroundings, and an increasingly sorrowful score repeatedly tell us how to regard suffering whose circumstances already carry considerable force. The restrained household exchanges allow meaning to emerge through familiarity; these passages press the characters toward martyrdom, making them easier to recognize as symbols and harder to encounter as particular people.
The folkloric details offer a less settled relationship to inherited belief. Dreams on Saturdays are expected to come true; goat’s milk enters the household through wartime necessity; the red-haired boy Makarov speaks with a directness adults cannot safely afford. Such elements allow religious practice and everyday superstition to coexist without a tidy division between them.
They suggest the persistence of ways of understanding events that military language cannot absorb. The difficulty comes when the eleven-year-old boy must carry an increasingly explicit promise of uncorrupted humanity. His mother’s heels, worn because the war has left him without suitable shoes, begin as an affecting detail of deprivation.
The later sexual violence against Makarov places that detail under punishing symbolic pressure. Reaction shots of his parents watching extend the scene’s horror, but they also recruit additional witnesses to certify an atrocity whose meaning needs little reinforcement.
The boy’s ordeal becomes a test of preserved innocence, narrowing the space available for the experience of the harmed child. Spring has already made civilian vulnerability palpable through military intimidation, prohibited mourning, and the difficulty of finding shoes. At this point, its insistence on making goodness survive visibly risks enclosing that vulnerability within a reassuring moral design.
The seasonal promise contained in Vesna, its original title, encounters a similar resistance from the film’s most persuasive material. Spring will loosen the earth, but a thaw serves the occupiers’ plans for mass burial as readily as it makes individual funerals possible. Nature supplies no judgment between those uses. For the priest, warmer ground would restore a practical means of carrying out his duty, while leaving the military prohibition intact. The people awaiting their relatives still need someone prepared to disobey it.
Spring (released in international festival markets under its original title Vesna) made its world premiere in the Special Screenings section at the 79th Cannes Film Festival on May 18, 2026. Directed by Rostislav Kirpičenko, the Ukrainian-Lithuanian-French war drama follows a village priest in occupied Ukraine who risks his own life to covertly return executed civilian bodies from his church-turned-morgue to their grieving families.
Full Credits
Title: Spring (Original title: Vesna)
Distributor: JHR Films, Film Jam, Matka Films, ESSE House
Release date: May 18, 2026 (Cannes Film Festival Premiere)
Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes (95 minutes)
Director: Rostislav Kirpičenko
Writers: Rostislav Kirpičenko
Producers and Executive Producers: Stasys Baltakis, Thomas Hakim, Vitaliy Sheremetiev, Olga Beskhmelnitsyna
Cast: Kęstutis Cicėnas, Bartas Ždanovičius, Anastasiia Pustovit, Daumantas Ciunis, Viačeslav Lukjanov, Šarūnas Datenis, Ieva Gladij
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Jaroslaw Waliszewski
Editors: Gabriel Gonzalez
Composer: Sten Šeripov
The Review
Spring
Spring brings the burial conflict of Greek tragedy into occupied Ukraine with force and specificity. Andriy’s forbidden work makes religious duty tangible, supported by restrained performances and a winter landscape that obstructs every act of care. Its solemn imagery becomes less persuasive when suffering is repeatedly sanctified, especially through the child’s ordeal. Kirpičenko’s debut is most affecting when the demands of protecting the dead leave its characters little room to become symbols.
PROS
- Burial rituals give civilian resistance concrete stakes.
- Restrained performances establish believable household intimacy.
- Wind, distant warfare, and winter photography sustain oppression.
- The tavern scene exposes how intimidation controls public life.
CONS
- Sacred imagery and swelling music overstate suffering.
- Igor’s ideological certainty sometimes substitutes for psychological depth.
- The child’s ordeal becomes subordinate to symbolic innocence.
