Articles

MEDUZA (USA 2025) ***
Directed by Roc Morin

MEDUZA is a many-layered film about a few subjects.  Though labeled a documentary and is actually one, and it feels like a live-action fiction story.  The film is called MEDUZA as it is the Ukrainian/Russian word for “jellyfish” and also evokes Medusa from Greek mythology. The filmmakers use this layered meaning to reflect the film’s themes.

The film begins with a voiceover talking about traveling faster than the speed of light across the universe before focusing on the manufacture of ammunition in an American arms factory.  The bullets are on display, the ammunition of snipers, the sniper being the subject of this mysterious feeling documentary.

When his hometown is invaded, a Ukrainian actor who once played a sniper in a movie becomes a real sniper on the front line. Meduza follows Ukrainian artist-turned-sniper Pavlo Aldoshyn from the first days of the war in 2022.  Pavlo is from a small village near a salt lake.  The film follows the real-life transformation of a Ukrainian actor into a frontline soldier.  When Russia invades Ukraine in 2022, his life imitates art: he joins the military and becomes an actual sniper.

Through all this, the film tracks Pavlo’s journey from artist to combatant, which includes the psychological toll of war with his inner reflections as he confronts real violence

This documentary stars famous Ukrainian actor Pavlo Aldoshyn (“White Raven”), who was also a contestant on Ukraine's version of The Voice before the war. The shoot took place over two years following the invasion, with some pre-invasion footage obtained from Pavlo and his wife, Katarin. The team was Director Roc Morin and Leïla Wolf, Morin’s producer and longtime film collaborator, who passed away in January. Morin had reported on the war starting in 2014 as a print journalist, and following the full-scale invasion, flew to Poland, walked across the border, and hitchhiked to Lviv because there was no organized transportation heading into the country at that time.

Throughout the film, Pavlo's inner life connects to a range of stories around the globe, including a Japanese widower searching the ocean for his wife, and an Amazonian tribesman describing the loss of a mythical ladder connecting earth and sky.  The interwoven global stories that echo themes of loss and survival.

 The doc shows Pavlo’s unique spiritual perspective of himself in the context of the war. Witnessing Pavlo’s psychological transformation over the course of the two years of filming, and the impact of his involvement in the war on his spiritual mythology and relationships, forms the core of the film and shows the intimate costs of war. Pavlo is still fighting on the front lines for his country, even today.

The film was shot in the United States, Ukraine, Japan, India, and Ecuador. The film is tied to the 4-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine.

MEDUZA is a slow-burning film that allows the audience to appreciate life while meditating on the effects of war and its futility.  The audience sees the world through the eyes of different characters, with a focus on Pavlo, who is an artist at heart and not really a sniper.  He says that the military is not his profession.

MEDUZA opens on digital platforms on February 20.