Moving paintings plunge us into the chronicles of Vladimir’s, or Rhino’s, family in the 1980s like pages from a family album: Rhino racing through sunflower fields, a drunk father ending up in prison, a mother immersing herself in work, a sister marrying, then returning home, a brother going to fight in Afghanistan… For Rhino, the early 1990s usher in an age of homo capitalisticus. He is the most brazen and greedy of the gangsters with nothing to lose. “I used to think that children could be cruel, but as I grew up I realised that adults could be even more cruel. Then you become one of them,” Rhino’s words sound like a confession.

After the Russian invasion on 24 February, Ukrainian director Oleh Sentsov’s brutal crime drama gained a new emotional layer. Once a political prisoner in Russia, he is now on the front lines. The film begins in the painful years of the Soviet Union and offers a promise of a new generation, but quickly changes into a genealogy coloured by the raw capitalism of the 1990s when aggression was the currency. Having screened at last year’s Venice Film Festival, Rhino taps into the Ukrainian subconscious, but also demonstrates Sentsov’s ability to present his vision of the nation’s destiny by using the language of the genre. A post-Soviet Eastern European variation on Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), it features a cynical but friendly rendition of the Big Children’s Choir’s “When My Friend Is By My Side” as Rhino divides and conquers.