‘Porcelain War’ Behind The Scenes Video Shows How Gear Got To Ukraine

EXCLUSIVE: In the nearly three years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a group of volunteers in the United States has shipped “over 32,000 Ibs of lifesaving aid and equipment to Ukrainian civilians turned soldiers,” helping the country survive a war of annihilation. A few of those shipments contained something extra – cameras, Go Pros, and other gear destined for the makers of the Oscar-shortlisted documentary Porcelain War.

A new video released by the filmmakers shows the challenging and dangerous process it took to get the gear from Los Angeles all the way to the frontlines in Eastern Ukraine. Click above to watch the exclusive behind-the-scenes footage.

The video begins with Porcelain War co-director Brendan Bellomo in L.A. packing a new camera and five Go Pros in preparation for an overnight flight to New York. There, the equipment is handed off to a woman named Victoria, a volunteer with Paramilitary Supply Network, who adds it to a shipment that will go on a flight to Poland.

“I visited her in her apartment, and I could barely walk through it because it was filled for this particular trip with 60 bags — giant duffle bags — absolutely filled with things that people had donated, medical supplies, military supplies, and she offered to carry the cameras,” Bellomo tells Deadline. “The plan was for her to bring everything to JFK [airport] in three trucks… She would check in all of this through the TSA, bring it into Poland, unload it into another truck, and then see if she could get through… the next border customs in Ukraine. And then she would have to drive everything across this active war zone… It was incredible and it was so brave. She’s a hero.”

It took a perilous 600-mile trek across Ukraine for Victoria to get the supplies – medical, military and cinematic – to Slava Leontyev, the co-director of Porcelain War. As the film reveals, Leontyev and his wife, Anya Stasenko, are artists who craft extraordinary porcelain figurines; but the war has forced Slava to exercise another skill — training Ukrainian special forces in the use of weaponry to defend their homeland.

“We got these bags, and we unpacked them. Sometimes, it was in blackout, and we used a small light to look inside. And sometimes we did not understand completely, ‘What is this? Is this our equipment for filming or it’s something for my [military] unit?’” Leontyev recalls. “Sometimes, we unpack these bags under shelling in a shelter and all this mix of cameras and military boots and these extreme cold weather [clothing] layers… It was all for our resistance. And that is why we are still here because these medicine supplies save lives in Ukraine right now. We never have enough, and we need more and more because [the war] hasn’t ended. But the cameras, [they’re also important] because our art is part of our resistance.”

When work on the documentary began, Leontyev and cinematographer Andrey Stefanov – an artist and close friend of Leontyev and his wife Anya – had no experience as filmmakers. It took remote instruction from Bellomo to help them figure out how to use the gear.

“Sometimes,” Leontyev says, “we pick up these devices, especially recorders — because all our experience before was experience in visual art — and we really await the next Zoom with Brendan to find a solution how to use this weird equipment.”

“We felt it was so important that we empower Slava and Andrey and Anya to tell their own story,” Bellomo comments. “This was all about being deeply authentic, about sharing an emotional truth of everyday people, of artists through their eyes and their own voice… We wanted not only for them to have these small compact cinema cameras that they could carry around easily and that they could adapt their instincts as visual storytellers into, but to open up this new part of cinema, which was the soundscape.”

Bellomo adds, “They would be hearing shelling and there would be dogs in the neighborhood that were crying and barking, and it was a horrible sound, but it defined what they were going through, which was a constant attack. It was museums being bombed; it was residential areas being bombed; it was schools being destroyed, universities being destroyed. And the sounds of these attacks were horrible, but they were really critical for the audience to hear just as Slava and Anya heard them.”

There are contrasting scenes shot in the bucolic countryside, with the artist couple and their dog, Frodo.

“They would travel, even though there were risks to it, into nature, nature that was being shelled or bombed, nature that was being land mined,” Bellomo notes. “It’s now the most land mined country in the world. And yet Slava and Anya and Andrey would go there to find inspiration for their art, to immerse themselves in the beauty of their country.”

Soldiers in the special forces unit trained by Leontyev wore the Go Pro cameras on their armored vests or helmets. Leontyev describes them as eager to do it.

“I was surprised because I always thought it’s too dangerous in battle to pay attention to something else,” he says. “But for them it was also a kind of decompression, in the middle of this destruction, to make something beautiful and something for our culture because really we lose so many of our artists and actors and cinematographers and writers and we cannot fix it. We must work [in place] of all these people who will never make something new.”

Leontyev says other units that received military gear from America were keen to know about his unit’s camera equipment.

“When I called, they said, ‘Okay, I received the equipment.’ And they asked, ‘Did you receive your camera?’ I said, ‘Yes, I received, but I want to know about your boots, about your helmet,’” he recalls. “’We’re happy [they said], but what about your camera?’ They were really so connected to our project.”

Porcelain War won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, in addition to dozens of other awards. It is also nominated for a PGA Award for Outstanding Producer of Documentary Motion Pictures, recognizing the work of producers Aniela Sidorska and Paula DuPré Pesmen.

Porcelain War is also a finalist for the 2025 duPont-Columbia Awards. “Using exquisite animation, combat drones, and wry first person narrative,” the duPont-Columbia Awards committee writes, “this evocative documentary is told by and about Ukrainian civilians called upon to defend their country who still cling to the beauty of their culture, art and nature.”

Watch the behind-the-scenes video above, showing how camera equipment reached the filmmaking team in the midst of war.