Director: Roman Liubyi
84 mins, Ukraine-Germany, 2023 Digital, Subtitled
On July 17th, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. Iron Butterflies presents the truth of what happened to MH17, but also what was at stake by not confronting it. Director Roman Liubyi uses a wealth of visual material and individual testimonies to craft this artful yet evidence driven examination of a turning point in recent world history. This act of mass murder not only destroyed so many people’s lives and the possible future that they could have built, it also contained the seeds of the future we now live in.
Notes by David O’Mahony