Iron Butterflies Review: A Transfixing and Dubious Aestheticization of the MH17 Tragedy

“In summer 2014, sunflower fields and coal mines in eastern Ukraine turn into a 12 square kilometers crime scene. A multi-layered investigation into the downing of flight MH17, in which a butterfly-shaped shrapnel found in the pilot’s body implicated the state responsible for a war crime that remains unpunished.” This description by director Roman Liubyi of his film Iron Butterflies isn’t so much a statement of intent as it is his call to creative arms. This is a documentary ostensibly about the truth of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, but in practice it plays as one self-consciously obsessed with its own making.

Take the early footage of what appears to be the filmmakers moving through the halls of a film archive in hazmat suits. As an archivist runs a clearly Russian state-produced film about self-propelled missile systems through a Steenbeck editing table, Liubyi is already positioning the viewer at a remove. The red lights of the Steenbeck, including its counter display, are conspicuously visible in the frame and contribute to an already ominous atmosphere. On the soundtrack, almost certainly not native to the black-and-white film that’s offered up as evidence of Russia’s infatuation with touting its greatness, is music that suggests Kraftwerk by way of “I Feel Love.” By the time we later see footage of individuals celebrating the sort of might that brought down MH17, you may even find yourself humming: We are the robots.

Iron Butterflies initially proceeds as if it will be an exposé—that it will bring us closer to the truth. Its aesthetic strategies, effective and fussy in equal measure, promise as much. Outside the Dutch courtroom where four men, all with ties to the Russian security services, were tried in absentia for the shooting down of MH17, a prosecuting attorney is heard but not seen as he speaks to reporters about the case. Inside the court, another attorney finishes reading the names of the victims and Liubyi lingers on the sound of her podium’s retractable countertop lowering itself. But what ultimately transpires inside the courtroom goes unexplored, as Liubyi is more interested in providing a sensorial impression of Russian dishonesty.

Russia’s guilt in the crash of flight MH17 has been de facto proven, so Liubyi would appear to understand that a conventional documentary about the tragedy would struggle against redundancy. The Ukrainian filmmaker’s previous documentary, War Note, has been described as a “surreal” journey to the frontline of the war with Russia, cobbled together from videos from the cameras of Ukrainian soldiers. Co-edited by Liubyi and Mila Zhluktenko, Iron Butterflies is also a collage, a transfixing mix of found and original video that in this case sets out to meditate on the farce of Russia’s denials that it was responsible for the crash of flight MH17.

In the film’s most casually chilling moment, a “fingerprint” of the contiguous movement of a missile convoy to the pro-Russian, separatist-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine where the plane was shot down is established by photos and videos uploaded to social media, after which Liubyi inserts an ominous Russian briefing in which the MH17 Joint Investigation Team (JIT) is accused of doctoring the footage by “Russian experts.” Liubyi, too, has a sense of humor, as when he caps the briefing, which claims that different convergence points in the footage point to the JIT’s fabrications, with video of a Russian psychic claiming that the plane wasn’t shot down from the air as she waves her hands over photos from the crime scene in a candlelit room.

Unfortunately, Liubyi otherwise doesn’t score his points so casually, and the lack of sobriety of the original footage that he inserts into film as a kind of punctuation mark to a crescendo of truth is questionable at best. Interspersed throughout Iron Butterflies are black-and-white vignettes that Liubyi shot for the film, depicting everything from Russian soldiers, their faces symbolically (and clumsily) blurred out, going about their duties to a group of individuals inside an airplane hangar moving around physical evidence of the crash in a sort of interpretative dance. But when color footage of individuals investigating the crash turns to black and white, it sometimes becomes difficult to tell what’s original footage and what’s found.

That may me the point, but it doesn’t make Liubyi’s strategies feel any less counterintuitive. It’s already dubious enough how a birdcage found at the site of the crash becomes the focus of a late-film animated reveal, and at one point, Liubyi inserts a vignette of a woman tinkering on a piano on a field as birds take flight. The art-house affectation of such digressions so suddenly pulls focus away from the ostensible subject matter of the documentary—that is, a distinctly Russian inclination toward subterfuge—that one may be excused for thinking that Iron Butterflies is less about “a turning point in recent world history” than it is about the self-centered way that Liubyi goes about transmuting a real-life tragedy into an aesthetic experience.