THE INTERMINABLE DISCOMFORT of waiting helplessly for something terrible to happen is one of the central devices which hold together the extraordinary Ukrainian film, Grey Bees, directed by Dmytro Moiseiev. You can still see it online and for free on this year’s European Film Festival in South Africa.

A microcosmic reflection on the ongoing war between Russia and the Ukraine, this film is profoundly Beckettian in its existential crises, dark humour and give and take articulated between the two characters, Serhiich (Viktor Zhdanov) and Pashka (Vladimir Yamnenko). They are neighbours, old men. They’ve known each other for decades and are utterly indifferent to one another.

But here they are. Still alive. In the same neighbourhood. Great holes penetrate their respective homes and rations give their kitchens the illusion that they are fed. The honey from the bees cared for by Serhiich is an interesting talking point that becomes currency for the soldier who visits. It’s a work that conjures up the whole litany of war narrative with its off-the-wall humour that rests uncomfortably on the memories of the dead and the stink of the decomposing. And as such relates to Ariel Dorfman’s 2012 allegory Delirium, which contemplates what political landscaping does to the ordinary guy in the street.

Like Yiddish literature of the quality of that written by Isaac Bashevis Singer, the give and take between these two men is self-deprecating and has a crazy rhythm where intrusive questions are answered with evasive questions and no one really gets any further for free.

And while the plot revolves around the death of a sniper by another man in the same neighbourhood, you hold more to the absence of plot, to the notes of absurdity which fill the spaces. Even the chairs are structured so that their sitters seem too low at the table. The home of each points in a different direction. Their attitudes to the war digress completely.

It’s not an obviously theatrical piece, wrapped as it is in the vagaries of war for the civilian, but in its devastating sense of oppression it contains the freedoms of spirit that come of mutual pain. Not quite empathy, it’s the kind of camaraderie that chooses life in the face of misery. And you land up loving them both, for this. Their unabashed basic humanity.

Grey Bees is premised on a real war, ripping our contemporary world into more shards as we speak, but it is less a political work than an existential one. And in the blood-stained snow and miserably empty cupboards, the shot glasses of vodka and the faraway presence of family, it is a contemplation of generic war and the potency of the human spirit.

• Grey Bees is directed by Dmytro Moiseiev and features a cast headed by Melisa Biliuk, Maksym Burlaka, Galina Korneeva, Aleks Stepaneko, Viacheslav Volkonskyi, Vladimir Yamnenko and Viktor Zhdanov. Written by Dmytro Moiseiev based on the eponymous 2018 novel by Andrei Kurkov, it is produced by Ivanna Dyadyura and features creative input by Andrii Ponomarov (music), Vadym Ilkov (cinematography), Oleksiy Shamin (editing) and Vladlen Odudenko (production design). In Ukrainian with English subtitles, it is part of the 11^th European Film Festival South Africa, and screens online for free on 20 October 2024.