In-Person
Rule of Two Walls: Ukraine New Cinema Festival–Symposium Screening and Q&A with the Director
This event has passed.
320 York Street New Haven, CT 06511
- All Ages
Sunday, March 29, 12:30 PM
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ), L01
Yale University
Free admission. No registration required.
Rule of Two Walls (2023), directed by David Gutnik, offers an intimate portrait of artistic life in Ukraine during the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Rather than documenting the war through front-line combat, the film turns to artists who continue to create amid air-raid sirens, blackouts, and the daily uncertainty of wartime existence. Painters, musicians, performers, and filmmakers gather in studios, apartments, and improvised cultural spaces, treating artistic practice not as escape but as a way of registering experience, preserving memory, and sustaining community. The title refers to a wartime rule of thumb advising people to remain between two interior walls during shelling; within this fragile margin of safety, the film observes moments of work, conversation, rehearsal, and reflection that reveal how cultural life persists even as the surrounding world is transformed by war. Moving between devastation and quiet resilience, Gutnik’s documentary becomes a meditation on the role of art in moments of historical rupture and on the stubborn continuity of creative life under extreme conditions.
The film premiered at the Tribeca Festival, where it received the Special Jury Prize, and was later awarded the Special Jury Award at the Odesa International Film Festival. It currently holds a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Executive produced by Liev Schreiber.
This screening is part of the Ukraine New Cinema Festival–Symposium at Yale, the culminating event of the Ukraine New Cinema series. Over the past year the series has introduced audiences to contemporary Ukrainian cinema through screenings of Klondike (dir. Maryna Er Gorbach), This Rain Will Never Stop (dir. Alina Gorlova), The Tribe (dir. Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi), and Stop-Zemlia (dir. Kateryna Gornostai). The festival expands the series through film screenings, scholarly conversations, and discussions with filmmakers.
Official trailer:
Co-sponsored by:
Yale Ukrainian Program · Yale Ukraine House · Slavic Department · The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund · Razom for Ukraine · Yale MacMillan Center Program in Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies · European Studies Council · Film & Media Studies · Yale Film Society · Penn State University