The plot of Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s new film ‘Pamfir’ hinges on a smugglers’ tunnel in the mountains between Ukraine and Romania. The protagonist, Pamfir, once a legendary smuggler, is forced by circumstances beyond his control to return to his life of crime. Only this time, his son Nazar, much to his father’s discomfort, gets entangled in the job – because only he is slim enough to get through the tunnel.

It's a familiar ‘one last job’ scenario, and the results are a study of moral choice and responsibility in the most difficult of settings: the poor villages of the Ukrainian Carpathians, where economic opportunities are few and the rule of law is loose, at best.

In this, his debut feature film, Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk, one of Ukraine’s brightest young directors and a native of Ukraine’s western borderlands, shows us a liminal place, perched on a fiercely protected yet porous border. It is an idiosyncratic take on a common theme in Ukrainian culture, which has long been preoccupied with the unpredictable political and cultural borders that have defined the country’s history, but which also frequently raises questions of other types of boundary: those between past and future, life and death, freedom and slavery.

In ‘Pamfir’, the border between Ukraine and the EU is a place where the line between the law and lawlessness is thin, as is that between survival and disaster: only a few precarious steps separate the protagonists from a loss of income, home, dignity – all the things that make them human.

This question of whether the characters are, indeed, human is at the heart of the film. Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk frequently breaks his surface naturalism and turns his protagonists, especially the men, into semi-beasts. When Pamfir, played with muscular intensity by Oleksandr Yatseniuk, returns home and makes love to his wife Olena, his animal-like grunts are deliberately exaggerated. It is a disturbing, grotesque image of masculinity that can be physically powerful yet ultimately helpless in the face of socioeconomic hardship.

As the family walks through the nighttime forest, they bark wildly like dogs to ward off wolves. The scene lasts an uncomfortably long time; in the end, the father, mother and son seem as gleefully wild and unafraid as any group of forest predators.

The vital smuggling operation takes place during the festival of Malanka, a popular event in the Carpathians that marks the ‘old’ New Year (of the Julian calendar) on 13 January and involves dressing up in fantastic, beast-like costumes, complete with shaggy cloaks, horns and giant teeth, and dancing into the night by firelight. The smugglers leave the celebrations, still wearing their costumes, and set off with their illicit cargo for the tunnel.

The obvious parallel in the use of Carpathian folk culture is Serhiy Paradjanov’s 1965 classic ‘Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors’, probably the most famous film in the history of Ukrainian cinema. Based on Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi’s 1912 modernist novel of the same name, and featuring, as ‘Pamfir’ does, many unprofessional actors, ‘Shadows’ uses the mountainous borderlands and the eerie folk customs of their inhabitants to explore the border between dream and reality, good and evil, life and death, nature and civilisation.

Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk is also interested in all these borders, but his variation on the theme involves a much more concrete border: that of the European Union, the frontier between Europe and not-quite-Europe.

While Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s war have been made welcome in the EU in a way not previously seen with other waves of refugees, Europe has not always been so accommodating.

For much of its post-independence history, Ukrainians have been excluded from work, travel or study in the EU by layers of hostile bureaucracy. Escaping poverty at home, they have been a significant part of Europe’s undocumented workforce. Whether manual labourer or renowned intellectual, the humiliating and labyrinthine process of applying for a Schengen visa, and the likelihood of rejection, were familiar experiences for many.

Unrequited love for Europe

That feeling of being kept at arm’s length by Europe was a feature of Ukrainian culture in the 1990s and 2000s. An online literary journal from the time, ‘Potiah 76’ (Train 76), referred to the train that travels from Lviv to Przemyśl, just across the Polish border – but no further. The Soviet-gauge rails end here, in a specially fenced-off part of the station, and (after Poland’s accession in 2004) EU bureaucracy begins.

The journal specialised in translating into Ukrainian the work of writers from east central Europe, many from countries equally marginalised in the new geopolitical order. The train (which today is used mainly by those displaced by the war in Ukraine) was a notorious smugglers’ route, and the journal’s authors saw themselves as an unrecognised, illicit Europe.

‘Potiah 76’ was edited by Yuri Andrukhovych, Ukraine’s leading novelist in that period, who made a career out of this bittersweet sense of unrequited love for Europe. The fate of the protagonist of his 1996 novel ‘Perverzion’, a Ukrainian writer who smuggles himself into Europe, is testament to that – rejected and misunderstood, he (probably) drowns in the canals of Venice.

By the time Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, not much had changed. The premise of Andriy Lyubka’s 2015 novel ‘Carbide’ is a scheme by a Carpathian school teacher to smuggle the entire population of Ukraine into the EU, thus bringing about the de facto total integration of Ukraine in Europe. The route for this operation is a tunnel under the mountains – “our own special path to a European future”.

Like the scheme of Lyubka’s school teacher, the Malanka smuggling operation in ‘Pamfir’ does not go to plan. Very quickly, both father and son, dressed in their beastly costumes, become animals hunted by rifle-toting border guards, both Ukrainian and Romanian, as they attempt to break through into the promised land of the EU.

The border here is not a line beyond which one becomes safe: it is a place where a citizen becomes a refugee, a worker an ‘illegal’ immigrant, a human being a beast.