WAR IS A great equaliser, even, or especially, when you are out of the context, when it happens. This is what Ukrainian 16-year-old Sofiia (Sofiia Berezovska) discovers in February of 2022, while on holiday in Tenerife with her little brother, her father and his girlfriend. Damian Kocur’s film Under the Volcano engages the surreal situation of war at home but celebration on holiday; you can see it on this year’s European Film Festival South Africa, in Johannesburg and Cape Town, until 19 October 2025. At the time of publishing this review, the festival’s website listed this film as ‘fully booked’.

It is here where we see a family stripped of a comfortable back story to go home to, and we get a glance at how an otherwise idyllic place can turn uncomfortably hostile, in its landscape but also in the elements which hours before seemed flawless and perfect. Strangers’ laughter feels antagonistic. The expanse of time until you see your loved ones seems cruel and forever. Tempers flare and nothing is what it should be, even though the hotel is bending over backwards to ease your pain.

Stripped of basic references to war, the piece has the potential of engaging the potent tropes in filmic projects of the ilk of Claude Lanzmann’s 1980 work Shoah, in which dialogue and footage of beautiful landscape carries the horror of murder and bloodshed. But the way in which Roman (Roman Lutskyi) and his girlfriend Nastya (Anastasiya Karpenko) bicker and clash, lightens the gravitas of the work, and makes it feel more like a typical divorce story: parents fight, the children take cover, everyone is traumatised.

As with A Perfectly Normal Family, also on this year’s festival, the work is saved, body and soul, by the performance of a young star. Berezovska, who was 16 at the time of filming. She’s going through the discomfort of being a young woman, different in her physicality and her self-confidence, to the tanned young nymphs on the beaches of Tenerife and she’s self-conscious in her long t-shirt and baggy shorts. But she’s got the internal energies of a young person who is old enough to know what’s happening but too young to have agency of her own, and is subject to the whims and temper tantrums of a parent and his lover.

There are achingly beautiful moments here, that have to do with the double-edged feelings evoked by fireworks and the romance of old architectural ruins, but the work as a whole feels too drawn out, treading along the axis of the same issues until it feel worn. The film also contains a moment featuring a Wolof-speaking teen called Mike (Mike Mensah), who is an illegal immigrant on the streets of Tenerife. This interchange with red-haired, pale-skinned Sofiia, truly has magical potential. It’s threaded through the narrative with a demure sense of the casual, but not sufficiently developed to hold its own, other than in the soundtrack which is haunting. But by and large, this isn’t the best of the fest.

•  Under the Volcano is directed by Damian Kocur and features a cast headed by Sofiia Berezovska, Anastasiya Karpenko, Roman Lutskyi, Mike Mensah and Fedir Pugachov. Written by Damian Kocur and Marta Konarzewska, it is produced by Agnieszka Jastrzebska and Mikolaj Lizut and features creative input by Nikita Kuzmenko (cinematography), Alan Zejer (editing), Anastasiia Chorna, Damian Kocur, Agatha Larionova and Agata Piesiewicz (casting), Aleksandra Markowska (production design) and Magdalena Sekrecka (costumes). In Ukrainian, Russian, German, Wolof and English with English subtitles, it is part of the 12^th European Film Festival in South Africa, screening at The Bioscope independent cinema Tin Milpark, Johannesburg, The Labia in Cape Town and Hyde Park NuMetro in Johannesburg, as well as online via the festival’s website, until 19 October 2025.