James Marcus Haney set out four years ago to film Kyiv’s rave scene. What began as a look at warehouse parties under curfew became Black Sunflowers, a portrait of young Ukrainians whose adolescence was swallowed first by COVID and then by war.
He was in Kyiv on a photography dispatch for Warchild just weeks after Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine when the project started. His original question was simple: what was happening in the rave world, and was that life still being lived? The answer, he found, was stranger than the premise. The scene he thought he was chasing had turned into day parties built around curfew restrictions, and the film kept widening as he returned to the region over the next four years.
Haney now says the film follows a cross-section of people under 22, a generation that was basically children when COVID arrived. He argues that the pandemic stole the years when adolescence should have happened, and that after the pandemic ended, Russia invaded and they were forced into adulthood overnight. In his telling, young Ukrainians are pushed toward choices no teenager should face: a rifle, a tourniquet, or shame.
The title points to the country itself. Sunflowers are a national symbol of Ukraine, and the flag is described as a field of sunflowers under a blue sky. After the invasion, those bright fields were peppered with mines that blocked farmers from harvesting, and the flowers turned black on the stalk. That image gives the film its weight: a country that once exported sunflower seeds and oil now sees one of its defining symbols scarred by war.
Haney also sees a larger problem in how war is watched. He says a few images from Vietnam helped shift public opinion, but the flood of pictures from Ukraine now sits beside recipes and a Jeffrey the raccoon feed until it all blurs into nothing. That is the friction inside Black Sunflowers: it is trying to make viewers feel what constant exposure has dulled. He says the film needs to put foreigners in Ukrainians’ shoes, to make them think, “Oh, wow, that’s us,” because news coverage is not doing that.
Four years after it began, the film is no longer mainly about a music scene. It has become a wartime portrait with the rave project folded inside it, and the open question is not what inspired it, but how widely it will travel and whether it can cut through the noise Haney says has already made Ukraine’s suffering easy to ignore.
