Iron Butterflies: Flight 17 Doc is a Scattered Memorial, Like a Crash Site
Liam Lacey
Rating: B plus
Ukrainian director Roman Liubyi’s Iron Butterflies is an experimental film, a memorial scrapbook and a forensic documentary that revisits the 2014 downing of the Malaysian passenger plane, Flight 17.
The plane, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was apparently mistaken for a Ukrainian military transport plane, and was shot down over Russian separatist-held Donbas territory, killing 298 passengers and crew.
The title refers to the shape of the shrapnel pieces inside the missile warhead, part of the proof that the launcher and missile originated with a brigade in the Russian Federation that had crossed the border, and then returned to Russia after the launch.
The image of that explosion influences the scattered jigsaw puzzle style of the film, including smartphone footage, vintage military propaganda films, animation, absurd Russian news coverage and black-and-white choreographed performances.
The effect is, by turns, sardonic, moving, and, poetic: A murmuration of starlings against a dark sky over the crash site, contrasts with a later sequence showing a contemporary flight tracking map, with green airplane symbols moving across Europe, avoiding a hole over Ukraine.
On the other hand, it can also seem misguidedly artsy and self-indulgent: Repeated scenes of dancers in black-and-white footage are trivial compared to the emotional impact of the victims’ belongings strewn over the fields of the wreckage site.
The information presented about the crash is far from new. By the fall of 2014, the crowd-sourcing investigative group, Bellingcat, had already established that the source of the missile and Buk launcher were from a Russian brigade. This was confirmed by a 2018 report of the international Dutch Joint Investigative Team.
The film includes footage of the subsequent Dutch criminal inquiry (two thirds of the victims were from the Netherlands) which found two Russians and a Ukrainian separatist guilty, in absentia, of murdering all 298 people on board.
Several specific stories go beyond the headlines.: One animated sequence focuses on a box of live pigeons being shipped halfway around the world. We learn that several of the victims were headed to an AIDS conference in Melbourne, and we watch the convention opening on a note of grief and shock. In what could easily be a separate short film, we hear Dutch musician Robby Oehlers talk about losing his young cousin and her fiancé in the crash. He travels to the crash site, in the midst of an active war zone, to pay homage to the couple.
Inasmuch as Iron Butterflies has a theme, it’s about the feedback loop between political lies and violence: In the film, we repeatedly see the absurd distortions of Russian television news - from doctored video evidence to consulting a psychic, to disprove the Russian Federation’s culpability for the crime. A Dutch prosecutor in the case quotes from the Russian novelist and dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “Violence cannot conceal itself behind anything except lies, and lies have nothing to maintain them save violence.”
This film is part of The Impact Series.
Iron Butterflies. Directed by Roman Liubyi. Opens Friday, August 25 at the Cineplex Cinemas Queensway, Etobicoke; Landmark Whitby, Whitby; Landmark Kanata, Kanata; Cineplex Odeon McGillivray Cinemas, Winnipeg; Scotiabank Theatre Saskatoon, Saskatoon; Cineplex Cinemas Normanview, Regina; Landmark City Centre, Edmonton; and Cineplex Odeon International Village, Vancouver.