"Tarantino" is no more. Tarantino died, weapons in hand, near the Donbas town of Soledar. In war, soldiers are given a nickname to communicate by walkie-talkie within their unit. As Viktor Onysko was a film editor, "and in the army they're not always very smart or imaginative," his wife Olga Birzul smiled, he became Tarantino. He had joined the armed forces a few days after the Russian invasion, on March 4, 2022, "and his friends at the front told me that, when it was time to advance, he marched first, leading his people, brandishing his weapons in imitation of Tarantino characters," the American director of Inglourious Basterds.

In the autumn of 2022, Tarantino and his unit fought for 40 days to retake the town of Kherson from Russian forces, before joining the Donetsk and Luhansk fronts. From his camp and in the trenches, the former punk guitarist wrote and filmed himself with his phone. In the last video sent to his wife and young daughter on December 17, 2022, his 40^th birthday, Tarantino, who had become a platoon commander, walked through a devastated landscape, whistling softly to an electro tune under his soldier's helmet. Singing in the war.

"My husband had a sense of rhythm and a musician's ear, which is another reason why he was such an excellent editor," said his wife. In this short, charming clip, which he intended to be optimistic but which evoked sadness, he passed a gutted nightclub and promised to return for an evening when he would DJ there himself. Thirteen days later, Onysko was killed by heavy enemy strikes, and the small arthouse film family gathered in Kyiv to console each other, without him.

Basic training

The Ukrainian film world has come to a halt. In a dramatic mise en abyme, the Ukrainian film world has found itself within the war, sometimes after having predicted and reported it in documentaries, often after having acted it out. Pavlo Aldoshyn, 36, didn't star in the same kind of feature films as Tarantino, but he has found himself fighting the same enemy. During a visit home from his camp, the actor met Le Monde on the outskirts of the small Ukrainian town of Rzhyshchiv, some 60 kilometers southeast of Kyiv.

He rolled his soldier's balaclava into a cap, sat astride a low wall with his steaming cup of coffee, and in the October sunshine his beard glinted the same gold as his earring. "Ukrainian soldiers can grow their hair as they like – beard, mustache, long hair – that's what differentiates them from the Russians," he said. He was wearing precision glasses, the same ones he wore for his last role, a film shot just before the war: Sniper: the White Raven.

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