A Moscow start-up of gifted coders, desperate for an investor, is lured by a jovial fixer with FSB ties into hacking a French presidential campaign — and learns too late that in Russia's cyber war there is no way out. A docudrama that weaves fiction and archive to reconstruct real Russian cyber operations, from the Kyiv blackouts to the 2017 Macron leaks.
About the project
War in the Fifth Domain is a €350,000 TV movie commissioned to expose Russia's cyber war against Ukraine and Europe. Fictional spy-thriller scenes are intercut with archive footage from Associated Press, Reuters, Ukrainian TV channels and private collections. The film is built on in-depth research: we consulted hackers and cybersecurity specialists and drew on sources such as Daniil Turovsky's book Invasion: A Brief History of Russian Hackers (original title: Vtorzhenie, 2019). The film is completed and awaiting archive clearances before release.
Development began in 2020, during the pandemic. I joined the project as co-writer, turning producer Charles Verpoorten's original idea into a script with Belgian filmmaker Hossein Sadre, and then the producers asked me to direct the film. We shot from spring to autumn 2021 in Kyiv, Ukraine, and on the French and Italian Riviera, in about 30 shooting days. The lead role was played by Oleksiy Khilskyi, who was killed in action defending Ukraine in August 2023.
Credits
Writers
Ievgen Koshyn, Hossein Sadre
Director
Ievgen Koshyn
Producer and original idea
Charles Verpoorten
Executive producer
Eduard Yevtushenko
Starring
Oleksiy Khilskyi, Karyna Chernyavska, Serhii Solopai
Director of photography
Dmytro Sanin
Production designer
Ievgen Anisimov
Editor
Oleh Cherniavskyi
Composer
Maxim Smogol
Sound Designer
Oleksii Myronenko
Production Company
UFI Production for Galaxy Digisat
Film on IMDB