Fred Again, Brian Eno Score James Marcus Haney's 'Black Sunflowers,' Set for Toronto Premiere
A feature documentary about Ukrainian youth living between underground raves and the front lines of war will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on 11 September. The film, titled Black Sunflowers, is directed by American film-maker James Marcus Haney and screens in the TIFF Docs programme at TIFF26, the festival's dedicated non-fiction strand (The Hollywood Reporter).
The Hollywood Reporter published an exclusive first-look at images from the documentary on 17 August, ahead of the festival (The Hollywood Reporter).
Haney first made his name as a film-maker by sneaking into Coachella, Glastonbury and other major music festivals by posing as press, a stunt captured in his 2014 documentary No Cameras Allowed. For Black Sunflowers, he worked with a Ukrainian film crew and Ukrainian producers including Volodymyr Yatsenko, partnering the project as a Ukraine and U.S. co-production (The Hollywood Reporter; Deadline). The producer roster also includes Pedram Rezaee, Mikayla Jean Miller, Yevhenii Zdorovylo, Samy Mosher, Eric Maldin and Anna Yatsenko.
The documentary follows several young Ukrainians navigating martial law and compulsory military service. Among the subjects: an army truck driver who races his car through city streets when back home, a young amputee soldier who finds freedom on a rave dance floor with a blade prosthesis, a young woman who turns from nature photography to war photography amid the ruins, and a young woman trained to shoot a rifle as youth face conscription (The Hollywood Reporter).
In a director's statement on the TIFF website, Haney said of his first arrival in Ukraine: "I was surprised to see how much normal life carried on, despite the war. I couldn't help but think that mainstream media is missing half of the story" (The Hollywood Reporter).
The film carries an original score by Fred Gibson — known to music fans as Fred Again — alongside Brian Eno and Koloah (The Hollywood Reporter). The pairing brings a heavyweight electronic and ambient pedigree to a documentary that moves between bass-heavy rave scenes and the grinding reality of a country at war.
Black Sunflowers joins a wave of Ukraine war documentaries at festivals this cycle, including Roman Liubyi and Volodymyr Tykhyy's Time Machine Maidan, Mstyslav Chernov's 2000 Meters to Andriivka, and Militantropos by Alina Gorlova, Yelizaveta Smith and Simon Mozgovyi (The Hollywood Reporter).
What gives Black Sunflowers its particular charge is the tension between its setting and its subjects. These are people barely into adulthood, dancing and racing cars one day, facing rifle training the next. Haney's instinct, forged in the festival-sneaking doc world of music and youth culture, is to stay close to that texture rather than retreat to the broad strokes of news coverage. The score by three artists rooted in dance music underscores that approach: this is war as lived by the generation inside it.
