‘I want to see out the war’: Irish filmmaker moved to Ukraine from Russia when ‘the pessimists were proved right’

Few Irish people understand Russia and Ukraine as well as Johnny O’Reilly.

The 52-year-old filmmaker from Rathmines in Dublin graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a degree in Russian in 1995. He had spent a year abroad in Moscow. “I learned the language and fell in love with the culture,” O’Reilly says. “I always wanted to return.”

After university, O’Reilly worked as a journalist and decided he wanted to make movies and studied cinema in Dublin. He moved back to Moscow from 2006 until 2017, during which time he wrote and directed two feature films, co-produced two movies and established a film festival and a film distribution company.

Moscow Never Sleeps, O’Reilly’s biggest project, was a commercial success in Russia and showed in 10 US cities. Like Joyce’s Ulysses, it recounted one day in the life of a city, through a half dozen characters.

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The film’s release in the US coincided with Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, for putting pressure on Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy to discredit the Biden family. O’Reilly projected the title Moscow Never Sleeps on to the side of the Trump building in Manhattan for several minutes before police intervened. His video of the incident went viral and was used to promote the movie.

[ My film is a love letter to Moscow, my home for 12 years ]

With each landmark on Russia’s descent into dictatorship, “the pessimists were proved right,” O’Reilly says. “Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, the invasion of Ukraine in 2014, the increase in repression after that, the crazy, full-scale invasion last year. I left in 2017 because I realised I would not be able to make the kind of movies I wanted to.”

At the same time, Zelenskiy came to power “with the promise of a young, reformist government, and they were filmmakers!” O’Reilly says. “I came to Kyiv to see how I would feel about moving here.”

O’Reilly had worked for the Irish Film Board and knew how effective a film commission can be in liaising with film producers and attracting foreign investment. He lobbied to set up a film commission in Ukraine. His efforts were defeated by the Covid-19 pandemic.

He then wrote a screenplay for a movie entitled Kompromat, the term for compromising material used to blackmail someone for political purposes. “It’s a dark comedy about two Ukrainian YouTubers who make a deep fake video of Donald Trump with prostitutes. The CIA and FSB both believe it is true,” O’Reilly explains.

He finished the second draft on February 24th, 2022. There was obviously no point attempting to make a movie in Ukraine that had nothing to do with the war.

O’Reilly worked as a freelance journalist for the first six months of the war. He did a video interview with an Orthodox priest called Maxim, “a citizen fighter with the territorial army and a well-known activist” who was hiding from Russian occupation forces in Kherson.

“Maxim’s friends were arrested, tortured and forced to betray comrades. Maxim decided it was more dangerous to stay than to leave and asked me to help him escape. There were a lot of ex-CIA and ex-special forces still around here trying to help. We put together a plan with a boat-driver who went across Russian-controlled waters, armed and with night vision equipment.”

O’Reilly met Maxim at a secret base where 700 men from Kherson were training to liberate their city. “I saw immediately that it would be a great documentary,” he says. The men in the camp were pushed to the front lines when Ukrainian forces liberated Kherson last November. O’Reilly sent a film crew with them.

He zeroed in on six real-life characters: three men and three women, including the priest, a former mayor and a couple of grandparents who were resistance leaders under the occupation. One character is a soldier who assassinated Russian soldiers, another a 19-year-old who was arrested and tortured.

The main edit will begin next month, and O’Reilly’s documentary, Kherson, Freedom’s New Frontier, will come out late next year.

[ Kherson residents blame ‘inhumane’ Moscow for destroyed dam as flood waters rise ]

[ Russian opponent of Putin: ‘We are getting weapons from the Ukrainians ... rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades’ ]

O’Reilly returns often to Ireland, where his mother and four of his seven siblings live. He has no opinion on the debate about Irish neutrality.

“It’s an interesting discussion to have in Ireland, but it will not make much difference to the outcome of the war,” he says. “I do think it is important to relentlessly provide strong arguments to support Ukraine ... It is disappointing to me that a sizeable minority of people don’t see this war as it clearly is, that Putin started it. People need to know that this is a once-in-a-generation conflict similar to the second World War.

“I want to see out the war,” O’Reilly says. “I want to be here until the war is won.”