The adoption of threatened nations has always been a supreme discipline for intellectuals. Régis Debray went to Cuba in 1965, Susan Sontag travelled to Hanoi in 1968, and it was only logical that Bernard-Henri Lévy left for Ukraine in 2022, because he has made the type of travelling committed person his personal life model.

The Reporter Who Got into the War

In the wake of the thinkers like to come the stars, Jane Fonda for example in Vietnam, now Sean Penn in Ukraine. At the weekend, the film "Superpower" premiered at the Berlinale. Penn acts – together with Aaron Kaufman – as co-director, but above all he can be seen in front of the camera, as a frenzied reporter who wanted to get a picture of Ukraine and got into the middle of a war.

If a country is attacked by a former superpower or a regional power with an inferiority complex, it must become a superpower itself in order not to perish. That's how you have to imagine the considerations behind the title "Superpower", although there is also a slightly sentimental punchline before the credits.

Sean Penn brings with him from his films as an actor (for Brian De Palma or Paul Thomas Anderson) an image to which he himself alludes again and again: an eternal "angry young man", who even beyond the 60 years he reached a while ago, wants to uphold a certain type of man, the tough guy with a cigarette, Drink and rough voice.

Sean Penn wanted to know more about Ukraine

Ukraine caught his eye when it played a role in the first attempt to impeach Donald Trump: a country long in the shadows that had made a comedian its president. Penn wanted to know more, the media group Vice, specialized in documentaries with a consciously personal perspective, provided logistics and production.

And so it happened that Penn came to Mariupol in the fall of 2021, where war was already very close before February 24, 2022. And finally, it turned out that he was in Kiev on the day Russia started its attempt to get the whole of Ukraine under its occupation. A meeting with President Zelensky was arranged, and while he was certainly very busy while tanks rolled towards the capital and paratroopers tried to capture an airport not too far away, he took the time for Sean Penn. He already came in the camouflage T-shirt that accentuates his muscular torso well and has since become his trademark. Penn wore something suitable.

Zelenskyj knew at that moment, of course, that the pictures of this meeting would not be on television the next day, at least not with the detail with which they can now be seen in "Superpower". But he and his team had obviously understood immediately that it would now be important to organize support from the Western powers. Concrete support with weapons, but also ideal solidarity.

The encounter had a cultural aspect, because here two masculinity cultures met, which showed many parallels. Above all, it was one of the first opportunities for Team Zelenskyi to do public relations work for the threatened nation.

Two narrative styles meet

One of the hopes that could be placed on "Superpower" in advance was that perhaps someone would have gotten a little privileged "access" to this media work, i.e. could have taken a look behind the scenes. But Sean Penn is so much part of his own production that in "Superpower" two clever narrative styles simply meet and the reading between the lines, which is often still productive even in such films, remains almost empty of content.

Penn left Kiev on the second day of the war, but then made himself one of Ukraine's first ambassadors to America, including calls to Joe Biden's office to hear Andriy Yermak, Zelenskyi's main aide. This would probably have been the case without Penn's mediation, but a little celebrity as a tool rarely hurts in politics.

In the summer, when the situation for Ukraine looked a bit more hopeful, Sean Penn returned. Now he also had to go to the front. As with Bernard-Henry Lévy, who chose "Pourquoi Ukraine?" (2022) had been filmed at numerous comparable moments, physical contact with the enemy (even if only through artillery noise) is the proof against which the commitment – and implicitly also the sincerity of the documentary position – wants to be measured.

"Superpower" hints at at least so much of its own "embeddedness" in the structures of the Ukrainian defense, so as not to naively claim a heroic function, especially for its own reporter courage.

A number of interesting people also appear, for example Yulia Marushevska, who was once supposed to reform the notoriously corrupt port authority of Odessa, but who is now not quite clear why she gets speaking time.

But the hectic style of "superpower" never allows a topic to be deepened to such an extent that one could really understand what is actually being fought for in Ukraine. Namely, about more than just territorial integrity. The large, media-reflexive documentary about Zelenskyi in the war can only come from his own environment at some point. It is one of the desiderata associated with the hopes for a just peace. And, if it does exist one day, it will also be an indication of whether Ukraine emerges from this invasion as a democracy.