Valentyn Vasyanovych’s To The Victory! wins 2025 TIFF Platform Award unanimously

Set in a near-future Ukraine grappling with the aftermath of war, To The Victory! blends the filmmaker’s signature long takes and austere visual style with a meta-narrative about art, trauma, and national identity.

The film stars Vasyanovych himself as Roman, a director in Kyiv striving to make a new film while navigating separation from his wife and daughter, who have fled to Vienna. His son remains with him — a generational tether to a country unraveling. The film was praised for its formal rigor, emotional depth, and willingness to confront the lingering psychic costs of conflict.

The Platform Award, celebrating its tenth edition and named after Jia Zhang-ke’s Platform, comes with a CAD 20,000 prize. This year’s jury recognized Vasyanovych’s work as “an urgent, formally daring reflection on post-war survival, artistic persistence, and the quiet devastation of emigration.”

Told through both dramatic scenes and film-within-a-film sequences, To The Victory! explores a depopulated Ukraine haunted by its own decline. Cemeteries become emblems of both personal and national grief, and the screening of The Color of Pomegranates inside an abandoned cinema serves as a quiet assertion that art endures — even as citizens disappear and futures fade.

“If they all leave,” one character warns, “the country will become only a territory.”

The film’s fractured timeline and self-referential moments blur documentary and fiction, constructing a layered meditation on exile, resistance, and the ethics of storytelling.

Vasyanovych, whose past films Atlantis (2019) and Reflection (2021) chronicled the war in Ukraine, here turns his lens inward — casting himself not just as director, but as a man reckoning with loss and obligation. With To The Victory!, he deepens an ongoing cinematic inquiry: not only into what war does to a country, but what it leaves behind.

(Reporting by Asha Bajaj)