Toronto: Black Sunflowers First Look at Ukrainian Youth Coming of Age

James Marcus Haney made his name as a filmmaker sneaking into Coachella, Glastonbury and other top music festivals by posing as press to get exclusive footage of pop stars and their performances.

That need to gate crash marquee festivals with his camera was captured in his 2014 feature documentary No Cameras Allowed. Now Haney is headed to the Toronto Film Festival with Black Sunflowers, a feature documentary about Ukrainian youth coming of age amid martial law as they move between underground raves and car racing on the home front and the brutal front lines of war against Russia.

And the American filmmaker has Sean Penn on board to executive produce, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. Hollywood actor and activist Penn has put his name and face on the Ukrainian conflict before, especially in 2023 when he chronicled Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the ground in Kyiv with Superpower. Co-directed with Aaron Kaufman, that war doc included interviews with President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The first images for Black Sunflowers, which will have a Sept. 11 world premiere in Toronto, have young Ukrainians facing tragedy and duty as soldiers on the front lines, while they find distraction on concert dance floors, in relationships or bonding at a local watering hole.

Working with a Ukrainian film crew, Haney captures an army truck driver who races his car down city streets back home; a young amputee soldier finding freedom on a high energy rave dance floor, despite a blade prosthesis; a young woman turning from nature photography to war photography amid the ruins of war; and still another young woman being trained to shoot a rifle as a generation of youth face compulsory military service.

Haney, in a director’s statement on the TIFF website, recalls first arriving in Ukraine as war reshaped everyday life: “I was surprised to see how much normal life carried on, despite the war. I couldn’t help but think that mainstream media is missing half of the story.”

Haney’s film joins a slew of other Ukraine war documentaries, including Roman Liubyi and Volodymyr Tykhyy’s Time Machine Maidan, which bowed at Sheffield, Oscar-winning filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov‘s new film, 2000 Meters to Andriivka, and Militantropos, from co-directors Alina Gorlova, Yelizaveta Smith and Simon Mozgovyi.

Black Sunflowers is produced by Pedram Rezaee, Mikayla Jean Miller, Yevhenii Zdorovylo, Samy Mosher, Eric Maldin, Volodymyr Yatsenko and Anna Yatsenko.