‘Notes Of A True Criminal’ review: Alexander Rodnyansky explores Ukraine’s plight, past and present

Dirs: Alexander Rodnyansky, Andriy Alferov. US/Ukraine. 2025. 117mins

Ukraine’s precarious present is filtered through its tragic past in Notes Of A True Criminal. Filmmaker Alexander Rodnyansky has constructed a personal, despairing documentary that combines footage he shot more than 30 years ago with recent images emerging from the imperilled nation since Russia launched its invasion in 2022. The weaving of then and now puts Ukraine’s struggles for freedom in a larger historical context, illustrating the sickening deja vu that occurs as one generation after another lives under the thumb of an oppressive occupying force.

A sober approach is carefully balanced with Rodnyansky’s palpable dismay 

This Venice premiere is co-directed by Rodnyansky — a prominent producer of Oscar-nominated pictures by, among others, Andrey Zvyagintsev, including Loveless and Leviathan — and film critic Andriy Alferov, who co-wrote and co-directed the 2024 Ukrainian narrative feature Dissident. There has been no shortage of stellar documentaries about the invasion of Ukraine, and future festival play seems likely for this thought-provoking picture that analyses war from unconventional angles. 

An opening title card underlines the film’s personal nature, with Rodnyansky noting that the 2022 war symbolically began for him when his adult son Sasha called him from Rodnyansky’s hometown of Kyiv, letting his father hear the sounds of rockets exploding. Having been labelled a foreign agent by the Russian government and sentenced in absentia to more than eight years in prison last autumn, Rodnyansky ponders Ukraine’s long battle for freedom, the world Sasha will be inheriting, and his family’s deep connection to cinema. (Rodnyansky’s mother, father and grandfather all worked in film.) Drawing on archival footage and his own documentaries from the early-to-mid-1990s, he finds parallels between past atrocities and what he and colleagues have witnessed in modern-day Ukraine.

Rodnyansky, now 64, long ago abandoned documentary filmmaking to produce other directors’ pictures, but Notes Of A True Criminal demonstrates his striking visual sense. His footage of the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster is shot in smudgy greens and browns, a dark reminder of the deadly atomic fallout for those who lived in Kyiv, only 90 kilometres away. But Rodnyansky also goes further back, recalling the 1941 Babyn Yar massacre, during the time of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, when German police slaughtered approximately 34,000 Jews, including Rodnyansky’s own relatives, over the course of two days just outside Kyiv. 

Modern-day war footage does not include the intense, up-close combat we’ve seen in award-winning films like 20 Days In Mariupol. Instead, Notes Of A True Criminal features abandoned town centres, startled locals, shaken prisoners of war, and separated lovers. As Rodnyansky and Alferov go back and forth between time frames, assisted by editor Nazim Kadri-Zade, Rodnyansky’s sombre voiceover provides the emotional through-line. A riveting sequence involving the 2022 trial of Vadim Shyshymarin, a sergeant of the Russian armed forces accused of killing a civilian, is juxtaposed with Rodnyansky’s 1991 documentary Meeting With Father, in which a woman goes to visit her incarcerated father, who had been sentenced to death for his part in a mass shooting in Ukraine in 1942. Notes Of A True Criminal connects these different footage sources to underline how the emotional scars of war never change — or heal.

Another prominent voice in Notes Of A True Criminal is that of Felix Sobolev, Rodnyansky’s professor and mentor who made documentaries based around scientific experiments. Clips from several of his films are included, the most trenchant being 1971’s Me And The Others, which chronicles a test performed on children each served spoonfuls from the same bowl of porridge — although some sides of the bowl are sweet while others are salty. As the children go against their own instinctive reactions in order to agree with their peers about how the porridge tastes, it’s clear that Rodnyansky and Alferov are suggesting how groupthink can be a negative influence.

Structured in an episodic, sometimes academic way, Notes Of A True Criminal invariably has stronger and weaker segments. But the intelligence brought to bear gives the film a spirit of inquisitive exploration. Throughout, a sober approach is carefully balanced with Rodnyansky’s palpable dismay that the truly independent Ukraine he dreamed of in the early 1990s is still yet to emerge.