Rock, Paper, Scissors (2024)

A young man is playing this game with a younger boy in what looks like a makeshift hospital where a solitary doctor is trying to tend to the wounds of many casualties. It transpires that they are awaiting a truck to take them to somewhere possibly safer, but when “Ivan” (Oleksandr Rudynskyy) goes outside to reconnoitre he sees a Russian war plane blow it to smithereens. Their radio contact informs him that there are enemy soldiers close by and so taking a rifle from one of the other casualties he sets off to protect them all. He finds, though, that seeing a man through his gunsight and actually pulling the trigger are two completely different matters, and in the end - with so much of the battle being fought remotely from the skies, would killing them make any real difference to their plight? The effort from Rudynskyy, his character barely a man himself, is touching and the sentiment of the piece palpably tugs at your heart-strings as does the bleakness, almost moon-scale nature, of their medical hole in the ground. It’s set in Ukraine but serves as a much more depressing indictment of warfare in general.