Stronger than Arms / Sylnishe nizh zbroia

Stronger Than Arms is a documentary chronicle of the events of the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity and the war in eastern Ukraine — from the spontaneous attempt to seize the presidential administration building on December 1, 2013, to the battles in the ruins of Donetsk airport in the Fall of 2014.

The film was shot by a group of documentary filmmakers from the #BABYLON’13 group. All the footage was filmed directly at the epicenter of events, using their own resources and at their own expense. Some of these clips immediately became public and were uploaded to YouTube. Just like the events of the Revolution, the initiative to document the events on Maidan started from a personal desire for truth. Gradually, this turned into a group of like-minded people and a vast collection of material created by dozens of people.

Thus, the #BABYLON’13 group became a rather unique phenomenon in Ukrainian cinema, and their creations became an example of resistance cinema and one of the catalysts for the true boom of documentary filmmaking in Ukraine.

Stronger than Arms is only a part of the material filmed by the group’s documentarians. The title of the film is derived from a phrase that cameraman and one of the active members of #BABYLON’13, Yaroslav Pilunskyi, heard while being held captive in Crimea, where one of the militants told him: “Your cameras are stronger than weapons.”

The film was first shown on November 27, 2014, at the Kyiv Rus Cinema in the capital. Immediately afterward, the film was released in 20 of the largest cities in Ukraine. On February 19, 2014, it was broadcast on the “24” TV channel.