Six months after the bombs started to fall on Kyiv in 2022, choreographer Yuliia Lopata danced again.

Even though her life to that point had been dedicated to the transformative power of dance, there didn’t seem much point to it anymore once Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine brought death to daily life, emptying entire towns and rallying ordinary citizens from all walks of life to enlist in the Ukrainian military. It wasn’t like dance was going to win the war. The goal was to get through the day alive. 

Still, as family, friends and even a few fellow dancers took up arms, Lopata took to her feet. Not as an escape or a dalliance. As her own act of defiance. As her contribution to boosting the morale of her beleaguered friends and neighbors. As a testament to what women are capable of. As a tribute to the estimated 100,000 Ukrainians who have died just since 2022 – according to the U.N., at least 13,580 of them civilians.

To show them all – the Russians too – the passion and fight that an artist can put out into the world, even when that world is crumbling around them.

Because a dancer who doesn’t dance is an empty shell. Just another corpse.

Lopata and her Pro Contemporary modern-dance troupe did not surrender to their feelings of surrender. They put on a show. And not just any show. This would be the most personal and difficult piece any of them had ever attempted. Lopata joined forces with Gala Pekha – a choreographer on Ukraine’s equivalent of the “So You Think You Can Dance” TV program – to create a living demonstration of spirit and resilience as an act of creative protest.

Even if, after expending “all the fluids,” she said, the blood, the sweat and the tears they could not know whether their climactic public performance would make it all the way through without an air raid.

Boulder journalist and filmmaker Joe Hill was there to capture it all: The somber walk through a once glorious theater reduced to rubble, a child’s single shoe abandoned in the debris. The rehearsals that carried on through the sound of nearby explosions. The conflicted dancer who visits her soldier sister on the front line to ask for her blessing that, for now, she dance rather than enlist.

Hill’s documentary, “Match in a Haystack,” is dedicated to a dancer who traded her ballet slippers for a bulletproof vest and was killed in the conflict. The title is a variation on the idiom about the proverbial needle and locating something extremely hard to find. Here, it demonstrates how something so small as a match thrown onto a haystack can ignite a fiery sense of purpose within.

“For as long as Ukraine has existed, Russia has worked to suppress its culture,” Hill said. “It’s a culture that’s specific, and it’s one that should be celebrated. And despite more than three years now where war has been raging, and people have been dying, and in this moment where Ukraine is being erased from the conversation, I think it is important to take a moment to recognize that this culture exists.”

“Match in a Haystack” plays for the next week at the Sie FilmCenter. Watching it have its Denver  premiere screening on Friday, I could not help but think: How did this story playing out 6,200 miles away get told by a theater kid from Boulder County? And how on Earth did he get pioneering modern-dance superstar Misty Copeland as his Executive Producer? 

Surely, you Jester

Joe Hill is a five-time Emmy Award-winning journalist and a former producer for Vice News. His films have aired on HBO, Showtime, and Vice TV. Yes, he won five Emmy Awards before recently turning 30.

Hill might say his story begins with his enrollment at Carnegie Mellon University, which included six months at its sister campus in Qatar, where he interned at Al Jazeera.

Let’s walk that back to his celebrated birth back in 1995. His parents, Ruth and Karen Hill, made national news as, they say, the first same-sex couple to get both their names on their two children’s birth certificates.

The creative dye was set by the time he was 6 years old. That’s when he met Emmy Briggs, who grew up in nearby Erie. They were cast together in a production of “The Prince of Egypt” at the still-operating Jesters Dinner Theatre in Longmont. Emmy played young Miriam while Joe played the son of the Pharaoh. “I just remember that Joe played a dead child, and they carried his body out on stage. That’s where we met,” she said with a laugh.

Fast forward a bit, and Joe is playing the woebegone cowboy suitor Will Parker in Niwot High School’s staging of the quintessential American musical, “Oklahoma!” – a title that is now being staged as we speak back at, yes, Jester’s Dinner Playhouse.

But those early years in Colorado were not easy years for Hill.

“I’ll be very honest about this,” he said. “I think what led me on this path I am on was high school. Let me just say my experience in Colorado was pretty turbulent.

“I had a hard time when I was younger.  I struggled a lot with addiction, and I struggled a lot with not wanting to feel the things that I felt while engaging with the world.

“When I was about to finish high school, my parents offered me the chance to go to a boarding school, and I left. It turned out to be an art school, and that was the first time I really felt that I had a meaningful purpose.

“It became very clear to me there that there was something about the act of expression, the act of telling a story, the act of making something – and doing it with my friends. And so I started just trying to make things.”

After graduating from Carnegie Mellon’s prestigious John Wells Directing Program (named for the fellow Coloradan best known for creating “ER” and “The West Wing”), Hill joined Vice News and soon found himself covering some of the worst suffering on Earth, including famine in Somalia, pedophilia in Japan’s comic-book industry and impunity in the Indonesian police force. He was the first journalist to embed with mutinous soldiers who overthrew the government in Burkina Faso. His videos have more than 36 million collective views on YouTube alone. Australian filmmaker and podcaster Jye Curry says Hill “is a journalist whose fearless storytelling has reshaped modern documentary filmmaking.”

But no documentarian comes to a story about a courageous modern-dance company in Ukraine without a love for dance burning inside himself.

“So I was a tap dancer, which is kind of actually something I don’t talk about very often because it’s a weird transition from being a tap dancer to a guy who ended up doing war journalism,” he said with a self-effacing grin.

But when you see “Match in a Haystack,” it makes perfect sense. He played Will Parker in high school, after all. His fiancée, Maia Schechter, is a member of the dance-infused ”Moulin Rouge” national touring production that is currently stopped at the Buell Theatre through Sunday (Aug. 17).

Hill says he fell fully in love with dance while helping to make short films for a friend named Jake Kruty, who runs a New York dance film company called Retrograde Studios.

Hill’s work making something beautiful for Retrograde could not have been more different from his work “always chronicling the worst kinds of conflict” for Vice.

In fact, he initially approached what became “Match in a Haystack” as a Vice project. Hill knew of a Ukrainian dancer named Stefanie Noll, who tours the world with an elite company. Noll circuitously led Hill to Lopata, who told Hill she was thinking of developing her own performance in Kyiv. “And suddenly it was all about so much more than dancing,” Hill said. “That was really the catalyst for us knowing that it was time to go to Ukraine.”

He faced a multitude of challenges, most significantly that Vice, which was commissioning the film, went bankrupt in 2024, and nine months later cut hundreds of jobs. “And so we had a long process of trying to take the film back from them and finish it independently.”

Lopata never knew that her play would get staged. Hill never knew if his film would actually happen. Two artists on parallel existential tracks.

Hill’s short time in Kyiv (25 shooting days split over the course of two trips about a year apart) was downright calm compared to some of his previous assignments. Kyiv was considered an active war zone at the time, but it was not as perilous to Hill as, say, being embedded with the top hostage negotiator in Nigeria, or chronicling the plight of Afghan refugees after the Taliban captured Kabul.

“I think that we were very fortunate in our experience,” Hill said. “It’s not like there was no danger. We were still having to deal with curfews and getting stopped at checkpoints. We would wake up in the middle of the night and there’d be sirens and we’d hear the anti-aircraft guns going above us. But I would say that we were about 20 kilometers (12 miles) away from the true front line. Just comparatively, where we were was so much safer.”

When Vice went bust, Hill reconnected with his lifelong pal Emmy Briggs, with whom he had created what he called “a sort of pretend theater company” in high school. A decade later, they created a very real production house called Dangerous Company. Its first project is “Match in a Haystack.” At the launch of Dangerous, Hill told supporters, “I promise to keep fighting to create films that remind us that this life has some meaning in it.”

And there can be no greater show of support or credibility than having Misty Copeland aboard as the Executive Producer of your first full-length, independently produced documentary feature. In 2015, Copeland became the first Black woman to hold the position of principal at the American Ballet Theatre, one of the three leading classical companies in the country. She was a true prodigy who grew up largely homeless or living in a shabby hotel room with five siblings.

“Yes, Misty is a significant part of this film,” Hill said. “She’s boundary-breaking in many ways because she redefined what ballet looked like as an art form and who the audience could be. We heard that she was looking for ways that she can support dance more broadly, so I wrote her an email that said, ‘We could really use some help with this,’ and she said, ‘Yes. We’ll do it.’

“I think to many people, maybe dance is kind of niche. So it’s important to have a champion like Misty who can see that, ‘Yes this is a dance film, but for some reason I feel like it’s about this broader thing that registers in a profound way.’”

Now, to get it seen

Really the one with the hardest job now is Briggs. She is Dangerous’ Director of Distribution, meaning it is her job to make sure that “Match in a Haystack” gets seen. The film made its national premiere July 24 at the Angelika Theater in New York. Now the goal is for a limited theatrical run at more places like the Sie FilmCenter and streaming later this year.

Until that happens, Briggs said. “It doesn’t feel finished.” Meaning, the film is finished but, she adds (and spoken like a true theater kid), “it doesn’t feel finished until it gets seen, because the audience completes the process.”

Lopata and her friends will be watching the fate of the film with a kind of bemused interest from afar. In their encoded, stoic Eastern European way, they have “finally decided that they do like the film,” Hill said to laughs on Friday.

But really, knowing that people are still dying every day … knowing that foreign leaders are presently meeting to determine the fate of their country without having offered Ukraine’s leaders a place at the table … Ukrainians have much greater matters weighing on their minds.

Lopata’s time has been devoted to thousands of hours of community service. And to dance. Because in her mind, amid all the enormous casualties, the senseless deaths and the exponential injuries, art counters death.

“Whenever some piece of art is created, whether a book, a picture, a dance or a song, it means that something is born to the world,” said Nadiya Kupets – the dancer with the soldier sister. “And to me, that balances the lives that are being taken now.”

War is death; art is birth. And every birth, Lopata says, “brings us one step closer to victory.”