In 2014, when Marko was just 14 years old, Russia annexed the Donbas region of East Ukraine. The hybrid war between Ukraine and Russia’s proxy separatist army dragged on for years, eventually culminating in Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. By that time, Donbas was entirely under Russian control.
Marko grew up as a queer teenager in an antigay propaganda environment, moving through checkpoints each time with the fear of being either exposed for his sexual orientation, killed, conscripted to the army, or simply forced to dig trenches. One must understand that Marko comes from an anti-gay-propaganda environment, where Europe is mockingly called “Gayropa,” and coming out as gay could have cost him his life. Furthermore, his mother, due to her disability, became an alcoholic whom he had to care for from as early as the age of twelve, and this led him to pursue the idea of leaving the Donbas. These are the facts that started to fascinate me about him.
At the age of 15 he took his life into his own hands, got out through the checkpoints to receive a Ukrainian passport (in the occupied area only LNR passports are issued) and went on his first modeling job to Asia. This is where he stayed after another visit to Donbas in 2018 that was life threatening to him. Since then, COVID happened and Marko’s alcoholic mother, his most important person, passed away due to an untreated COVID infection.
Since 2018, Marko has been unable to return home. His apartment, located in the occupied territory, remains sealed and abandoned, bombarded by ongoing warfare. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the first soldiers to be forcibly conscripted and used as “cannon fodder” were young boys from Donbas like Marko, made to sacrifice themselves for Russia on the front line. To inherit his apartment, Marko would be forced to enter Russia, where he would face immediate conscription and be sent to fight against his own people. If he does not inherit the apartment in time, his home will most probably be seized by the authorities and sold to Russian real estate companies as part of a broader campaign of colonization in Ukraine’s occupied territories.
It blurs the lines between recovery and loss, where reconquest of a home through technology offers a false sense of return, but ultimately deepens the confrontation with what is lost.
The film’s immersive experience draws on the theological concept of rapture, which in its expanded sense refers to a profound change of location – be it physical, emotional, or spiritual. In this case, the rapture manifests on multiple levels – transforming your mind to another place, escaping reality or horrors. In a way, displacement for victims of war is a form of rapture, a forced removal from one’s home and identity. Yet the attempt to digitally revisit and reclaim that space, to heal through the virtual, introduces a different kind of rapture, almost a perverse twist. It blurs the lines between recovery and loss, where reconquest of a home through technology offers a false sense of return, but ultimately deepens the confrontation with what is lost.
The musical score for RAPTURE II – PORTAL was composed by the Ukrainian composer Heinali (Oleh Shpudeiko), who integrates early music reimagined through a modular synthesizer with themes of providence and contingency, melding past and present, technology and the sacred. This composition is influenced by the theological concept of rapture, drawing inspiration from the medieval hymn “Ave Maris Stella.”
This diptych is an attempt to confront the inescapable tension between memory and reality, between the body’s resilience and its fragility in the face of war, between the ones who are immersed in a state of RAPTURE and those left behind.
Alisa Berger
