Jan 23 — Porcelain War, a documentary about Kharkiv artists by Ukrainian Slava Leontiev and American Brendan Bellomo, was nominated for Best Documentary Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards, announced the US Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Porcelain War tells the story of three Ukrainian artists—Slava Leontiev himself, his wife Ania Stasenko, and their friend Andrii Stefanov—who stayed in Kharkiv at the start of Russia’s all-out war.

Living in the city under the onslaught of air raids, they kept creating their art—painted porcelain sculptures—and using them to decorate the buildings that were destroyed or damaged by Russian attacks.

“We fight so that our culture continues to exist, that our art continues to exist, that Ukraine continues to exist, and that’s exactly what we’re fighting for, and I think we’re good at this,” Slava Leontiev said to Deadline. 

Porcelain War premiered at Sundance in 2024 and won a Grand Jury Prize of the US Documentary section. Since then, the documentary has already received 37 awards and got 27 nominations at international cinema festivals.

2025 is the second consecutive year when the Ukrainian film has been nominated for the Academy Award. Last year, that was 20 Days in Mariupol, created by Mstyslav Chernov and his team, about the first weeks of the full-scale war in the now Russian-occupied city. 20 Days in Mariupol won the Academy’s Best Documentary Feature nomination.

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