IRON BUTTERFLIES

VERDICT: The downing of Malaysian Airlines’ passenger flight MH17 in 2014 over Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine becomes a prophetic and highly symbolic event portending the current war and its methods in Roman Liubyi’s doc, whose poetry can seem forced but is still capable of shocking.

Deborah Young, February 15, 2023

A lot has happened since a Malaysian passenger jet disappeared over the skies in Ukraine in July 2014 – over the lands of Luhansk and Donetsk that Russia had recently occupied, to be precise – and Roman Liubyi’s fraught but sensitive doc, Iron Butterflies, draws a straight line from that terrible event to the allout warfare of the present-day invasion. While largely sidestepping the morbid fascination of plane crashes (this one killed all 298 people on board), the filmmaker doggedly circles around the tragedy’s political and military implications and its aftermath, dominated by a Russian disinformation campaign designed to cast blame elsewhere.

The film recreates the drama from multiple viewpoints, including clips of the Russian special forces who were ultimately shown to have shot down the plane after mistaking it for a Ukrainian military transport. Full Review