After making her narrative feature debut with “Sisters in Arms,” a thriller about a battalion of Kurdish female warriors, Caroline Fourest, a prominent French journalist-turned-filmmaker, embarked on her boldest undertaking yet with her next project, “Broken Truth.”
An English-language love story and road movie, “Broken Truth” is set during the first weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Fourest shot it over seven weeks in Kyiv and across the war-torn country, almost entirely with a Ukrainian cast and crew, in the dead of winter, while missile and drone alerts continued to hit the Kyiv region. There were only a handful of French collaborators on set, including acclaimed cinematographer Thierry Arbogast, whose credits include Luc Besson’s “Léon: The Professional” and “The Fifth Element.”
“We’ve been trying to make this film for three years now, right from the start of the war,” Fourest said in an interview after wrapping the shoot in Kyiv, where she said she planned to board an overnight train out of the country because commercial flights remain suspended.
Penned by Allan Loeb (“Collateral Beauty”), “Broken Truth” centers on Julien, a cynical French disinformation strategist based in Kyiv who works in a bot farm and is in the process of selling his startup when the war breaks out. He unexpectedly falls for Katharina, a Ukrainian museum curator and single mother who distrusts him and the murky business he is involved in. As the invasion begins, the pair and Katharina’s 10-year-old daughter flee together, embarking on a road trip navigating the chaos of war.
Fourest, who is a top specialist of counter-propaganda and is regularly invited on French political talk shows, says she was immediately drawn to the project after it was brought to her through producer Jean-Charles Lévy, who had deep ties to Ukraine after working there on several movies over the years, notably on “The Revenge of the Shiny Shrimps.”
Lévy introduced Fourest to the script after American producer Robert Stein, who had initially sought a U.S. director, found that no American filmmaker was willing to shoot a feature in Ukraine during the war.
“I’ve been very involved with Ukraine for over 10 years,” she says. “When our American producer Robert Stein brought the screenplay to my attention, it was impossible for me to not fight to direct it. It was exactly the movie I dreamed to craft about Ukraine and the ravages of propaganda : through a beautiful love story torn apart by distrust and lies,” she says.
Fourest has indeed been involved with Ukraine for over a decade, dating back to a 2011 documentary on Ukrainian feminists for France 2, a couple years before the Maidan uprising. She later returned to report on Maidan for France Culture and served as a foreign observer during the first post-Maidan election in Odessa.
She says the script appealed to her because it’s “at the heart of what’s happening in the United States, what’s happening here, and what Russia has done to Ukraine. It’s really all these factories churning out fake profiles and fake narratives, pushing false stories and flooding the web and social media with false narratives to sow confusion and, sometimes, to serve authoritarian states like Russia.”
Despite Levy’s and Fourest’s experience and knowledge of Ukraine, “Broken Truth” proved a near mission impossible to pull together. It was originally conceived around an American lead but actors who balked at filming in Ukraine. She eventually turned to Sisley, who previously starred in the action franchise “Largo Winch.”
“I need a French actor who speaks English really well and fits the role, and as it turned out, Tomer Sisley was a perfect fit for Julien,” she says.
Fourest said audiences may be surprised by Sisley’s performance because “he’s not playing the savior at all.” “It’s not an action movie — it’s really a love story.”
Katharina is played by Pustovit, a Ukrainian actress whose real-life story closely echoed that of her character. Fourest said she discovered after casting her that the actress had volunteered extensively during the war to the point of burnout, had a boyfriend fighting on the front lines in Zaporizhzhia and had even been held captive by Russian forces for several days.
“She’s actually gone through experiences similar to Katharina’s in the film,” Fourest says.
Fourest and her producers also decided to take on the risk to shoot the entire film in Ukraine despite the ongoing war and were able to enlist a brave french insurance broker, Hugo Rubini, who came on board. “Without him, if we’d had to pay for insurance like you do when filming in a war zone, we definitely couldn’t have made the film on a €2.6 million budget,” says Fourest.
Operating in Kyiv meant coping with power outages, missile strikes and drone alerts. Fourest said the production relied on a military adviser equipped with software that could distinguish between alerts that posed a real threat to their location and those affecting the broader Kyiv region. That allowed the team to filter out many alarms and only seek shelter when it was absolutely necessary — it happened at least once during filming, when the cast and crew spent an hour in a shelter listening to drones explode overhead.
“Jean-Charles and I are stubborn. For us, it made no sense to shoot this film in Latvia, as was suggested, or anywhere else. First of all, because the entire beginning of the film takes place in Kyiv, and we film Kyiv, Khreshchatyk, Maidan, St. Sophia, St. Andrew’s,” she says.
“As you know, the Russians hit very hard this winter just to take advantage of the freezing temperatures, to really increase the losses and the impact. There were a lot of power outages, but Ukrainians know how to make do with anything. You have to figure it out, but they know how,” she reminisces.
Lévy says there was “no other place where we could have shot this important movie.” “Our crew became family and it was so important for us to show the industry is still standing and it’s still possible to shoot upscale, international-level English speaking feature films in Ukraine, even during the war,” he continued.
For the war sequences, Fourest also pursued authenticity. “All our Ukrainian soldiers are actual military actors. They’re all actors who joined the army and are fighting,” she says.
One of the leading actors, for instance, came to set between tours on an active front and returned to combat immediately after shooting, while one crew member had lost a foot after stepping on a landmine. Another had a metal plate in his head after surviving an explosion on the front line.
“It was just like that. Everyone has related stories; everyone has family members who died because of the war or who are on the front lines,” she says.
Ultimately, Fourest says the production became a source of collective purpose to the point that crew members told her the project had helped them “look forward again.”
The film got supported by the Ukrainian State Foundation, as well as French pay TV channel Canal + and broadcaster France Television. Levy’s Forecast Pictures produced it with Pronto Films, Wild Tribe, Be Cool Produzioni, Ethic Scenarii and Saga Films.
Fourest hopes to complete a first cut by September. The plan, she says, is for “Broken Truth” to premiere first in Ukraine before traveling internationally, with a festival launch hopefully in the cards.
