New York — “The Fall Guy,” the Ryan Gosling-led, action-comedy ode to stunt performers, opened below expectations with $28.5 million, according to studio estimates Sunday, providing a lukewarm start to a summer movie season that’s very much to be determined for Hollywood.

The Universal Pictures release opened on a weekend that Marvel has regularly dominated with $100 million-plus launches. (In 2023, that was “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” with a $118 million debut.) But last year’s strikes jumbled this year’s movie calendar; “Deadpool & Wolverine,” originally slated to open this weekend, is now debuting in July.

So in place of a superhero kickoff, the summer launch went to a movie about the stunt performers who anonymously sacrifice their bodies for the kind of action sequences blockbusters are built on. Going into the weekend, forecasts had the film opening $30 million to $40 million.

“The Fall Guy,” directed by former stuntman and “Deadpool 2” helmer David Leitch, rode into the weekend with the momentum of glowing reviews and the buzz of a SXSW premiere. But it will need sustained interest to merit its $130 million production budget. It added $25.4 million in overseas markets.

Working in its favor for a long run: strong audience scores (an “A-” CinemaScore) and good reviews (83% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes). Jim Orr, distribution chief for Universal, believes things line up well for “The Fall Guy” in the coming weeks.

“We had a very solid opening,” said Orr. “We’re looking forward to a very long, very robust, very successful run throughout the domestic box office for literally weeks if not months to come.”

But the modest start for “The Fall Guy” hints at larger concerns for the film industry. Superhero films haven’t been quite the box-office behemoth they once were, leading studios to search for fresher alternatives. “The Fall Guy” seemed to check all the boxes, with extravagant action sequences, one of the hottest stars in the business, a director with a track-record for crowd pleasers and very good reviews.

But instead, the opening for “The Fall Guy,” loosely based on the 1980s TV series, only emphasized that the movie business is likely to struggle to rekindle the fervor of last year’s “Barbenheimer” summer. “The Fall Guy” stars one from each: Gosling, in his first post-Ken role, and Emily Blunt, of “Oppenheimer.” Both were Oscar nominated.

“It’s going to be a very interesting, nontraditional summer this year,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for Comscore.

In part because of last year’s work stoppages, there are fewer big movies hitting theaters. Expectations are that the total summer box office will be closer to $3 billion than the $4 billion that’s historically been generated.

“The summer season is just getting started, so let’s give ‘The Fall Guy’ a chance to build that momentum over time. It’s a different type of summer kickoff film,” said Dergarabedian. “There’s always huge expectations placed on any film that kicks off the summer movie season, but this isn’t your typical summer movie season.”

In a surprise, No. 2 at the box office went to the Walt Disney Co. rerelease of “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.” The first episode to George Lucas’ little-loved prequels collected $8.1 million over the weekend, 25 years after “Phantom Menace” grossed $1 billion.

Last week’s top film, the Zendaya tennis drama “Challengers,” slid to third place with $7.6 million in its second week. That was a sold hold for the Amazon MGM release, directed by Luca Guadagnino, dipping 49% from its first weekend.

The Sony Screen Gems supernatural horror film “Tarot” also opened nationwide. It debuted with $6.5 million, a decent enough start for a low-budget release but another example of horror not quite performing this year as it has the last few years.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.

1. “The Fall Guy,” $28.5 million.

2. “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace,” $8.1 million.

3. “Challengers,” $7.6 million.

4. “Tarot,” $6.5 million.

5. “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” $4.5 million.

6. “Civil War,” $3.6 million.

7. “Unsung Hero,” $3 million.

8. “Kung Fu Panda 4,” $2.4 million.

9. “Abigail,” $2.3 million.

10. “Ghostbuster: Frozen Empire,” $1.8 million.
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RIO DE JANEIRO — Madonna put on a free concert on Copacabana beach Saturday night, turning Rio de Janeiro’s vast stretch of sand into an enormous dance floor teeming with a multitude of her fans.

It was the last show of The Celebration Tour, her first retrospective, which kicked off in October in London.

The “Queen of Pop” began the show with her 1998 hit Nothing Really Matters. Huge cheers rose from the buzzing, tightly packed crowd, pressed up against the barriers. Others held house parties in brightly lit apartments and hotels overlooking the beachfront. Helicopters and drones flew overhead, and motorboats and sailboats anchored off the beach filled the bay.

“Here we are in the most beautiful place in the world,” Madonna, 65, told the crowd. Pointing out the ocean view, the mountains and the Christ the Redeemer statue overlooking the city, she added: “This place is magic.”

Madonna performed her classic hits, including Like a Virgin and Hung Up. For the introduction to Like a Prayer, her head was completely covered in a black cape, a rosary gripped in her hands.

The star paid an emotional tribute to “all the bright lights” lost to AIDS as she sang Live to Tell, with black and white photos of people who died from the illness flashing behind her.

Later, she was joined on stage by Brazilian artists Anitta and Pabllo Vittar.

Rio spent the last few days readying itself for the performance.

An estimated 1.6 million people attended the show, G1 reported, citing Rio City Hall’s tourism agency. That is more than 10 times Madonna’s record attendance of 130,000 at Paris’ Parc des Sceaux in 1987. Madonna’s official website hyped the show as the biggest ever in her four-decade career.

In recent days, the buzz was palpable. Fans milled outside the stately, beachfront Copacabana Palace hotel, where Madonna is staying, hoping to catch a glimpse of the pop star. During the sound check on the stage set up in front of the hotel, they danced on the sand.

By midday Saturday, fans crowded in front of the hotel. A white-bearded man carried a sign saying, “Welcome Madonna you are the best I love you.”

Flags with “Madonna” printed against a background of Copacabana’s iconic black and white waved sidewalk pattern hung from balconies. The area was packed with street vendors and concert attendees kitted out in themed T-shirts, sweating under a baking sun.

“Since Madonna arrived here, I’ve been coming every day with this outfit to welcome my idol, my diva, my pop queen,” said Rosemary de Oliveira Bohrer, 69, who sported a gold-colored cone bra and a black cap.

“It’s going to be an unforgettable show here in Copacabana,” said Oliveira Bohrer, a retired civil servant who lives in the area.

Eighteen sound towers were spread along the beach to ensure that all attendees could hear the hits. Her two-hour show started at 10:37 p.m. local time, nearly 50 minutes behind schedule.

City Hall produced a report in April estimating that the concert would inject 293 million reals ($57 million) into the local economy. Hotel capacity was expected to reach 98% in Copacabana, according to Rio’s hotel association. Fans hailing from across Brazil and even Argentina and France sought out Airbnbs for the weekend, the platform said in a statement. Rio’s international airport had forecast an extra 170 flights during May 1-6, from 27 destinations, City Hall said in a statement.

“It’s a unique opportunity to see Madonna, who knows if she’ll ever come back,” said Alessandro Augusto, 53, who flew in from Brazil’s Ceara state — approximately 2,500 kilometers from Rio.

“Welcome Queen!” read Heineken ads plastered around the city, the lettering above an image of an upturned bottle cap resembling a crown.

Heineken wasn’t the only company seeking to profit from the excitement. Bars and restaurants prepared Like a Virgin cocktails. A shop in the downtown neighborhood famed for selling Carnival attire completely reinvented itself, stocking its shelves with Madonna-themed costumes, fans, fanny packs and even underwear.

Organization of the mega-event was similar to New Year’s Eve, when millions of people gather on Copacabana for its fireworks display, local authorities said. That annual event often produces widespread thefts and muggings, and there was some concern such problems might occur at Madonna’s show.

Rio state’s security plan included the presence of 3,200 military personnel and 1,500 civilian police officers on standby. In the lead-up to the concert, Brazil’s navy inspected vessels that wished to position themselves offshore to follow the show.

A number of huge concerts have taken place on Copacabana beach before, including a 1994 New Year’s Eve show by Rod Stewart that drew more than 4 million fans and was the biggest free rock concert in history, according to Guinness World Records. Many of those spectators also came to see Rio’s fireworks show, though, so a more fitting comparison might be to the Rolling Stones in 2006, which saw 1.2 million people crowd onto the sand, according to Rio’s military police, the newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo reported at the time.

Ana Beatriz Soares, a fan who was at Copacabana on Saturday, said Madonna has made her mark across the decades.

“Madonna had to run so that today’s pop artists could walk. That’s why she’s important, because she serves as an inspiration for today’s pop divas,” Soares said.

“And that’s 40 years ago. Not 40 days, 40 months. It’s 40 years,” she said.
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CHENGDU, China — In 2018, the censors who oversee Chinese media issued a directive to the nation’s entertainment industry: Don’t feature artists with tattoos and those who represent hip-hop or any other subculture. Right after that, a well-known rapper, GAI, missed a gig on a popular singing competition despite a successful first appearance. Speculation went wild: Fans worried that this was the end for hip-hop in China. Some media labeled it a ban.

The genre had just experienced a banner year, with a hit competition-format TV show minting new stars and introducing them to a country of 1.4 billion people. Rappers accustomed to operating on little money and performing in small bars became household names.

The announcement from censors came at the peak of that frenzy. A silence descended, and for months no rappers appeared on the dozens of variety shows and singing competitions on Chinese TV.

But by the end of that year, everything was back in full swing. What had looked like the end for Chinese hip-hop was just the beginning. “Hip-hop was too popular,” says Nathanel Amar, a researcher of Chinese pop culture at the French Center for Research on Contemporary China. “They couldn’t censor the whole genre.”

Since then, hip-hop’s explosive growth in China has only continued. It has done so by carving out a space for itself while staying clear of the government’s red lines, balancing genuine creative expression with something palatable in a country with powerful censors.

The effort has succeeded: Today, musicians say they’re looking forward to an arriving golden age.

Much of the energy can be found in Chengdu, a city in China’s southwestern Sichuan region. Some of the biggest acts in China today hail from Sichuan; Wang Yitai, Higher Brothers and Vava are just a few of the names that have made Chinese rap mainstream, performing in a mix of Mandarin and the Sichuan dialects.

Although Chinese rap has been operating underground for decades in cities like Beijing, it is the Sichuan region — known internationally for its spicy cuisine, its panda reserve and its status as the birthplace of the late leader Deng Xiaoping — that has come to dominate.

The dialect lends itself to rap because it’s softer than Mandarin Chinese and there are a lot more rhymes, says 25-year-old rapper Kidway, from a town just outside Chengdu. “Take the word ‘gang’ in English. In Sichuanese, there’s a lot of rhymes for that word ‘fang, sang, zhuang,’ the rhymes are already there,” he says.

Part of the city’s hip-hop lore centers around a collective called Chengdu Rap House or CDC, founded by a rapper called Boss X, whose fans affectionately call him “Xie laober” in the Sichuan dialect. The city has embraced rap, as its originators like Boss X went from making music in a run-down apartment in an old residential community to performing in a stadium for thousands.

“When I came to mainland China, they showed me more love in like three or four months than I ever received in Hong Kong,” says Haysen Cheng, a 24-year-old rapper who moved to the city from Hong Kong in 2021.

The price of going mainstream means the underground scene has evaporated. Chengdu was once known for its underground rap battles. Those no longer happen, as freestyling usually involves a lot of curse words and other content the authorities deem unacceptable. These days it’s all digital, with people uploading short clips of their music to Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese version, to get noticed.

Rarely can a single cultural product be said to have originated a whole genre of music. But the talent competition/reality TV show The Rap of China has played an outsized role in building China’s rap industry.

The first season, broadcast on IQiyi, a web streaming platform, brought rap to households across the country. The first season’s 12 episodes drew 2.5 billion views online, according to Chinese media reports.

In the first season, the show relied on its judges’ star power to draw in an audience. Two winners emerged from the first season: GAI and PG One. Shortly after their win, the internet was awash with rumors about the less than perfect doings of PG One’s personal life. The Communist Youth League also criticized one of his old songs for content that appeared to be about using cocaine, very much violating one of the censor’s red lines.

Then came the 2018 meeting where censors reminded TV channels of who could not appear on their programs, namely anyone who represented hip-hop. PG One was finding that any attempts to release new music were quickly taken down by platforms. The platform, IQiyi, even took down the entire first season for a while.

But by late summer 2018, fans were excited to hear that they could expect a second season of The Rap of China, though there was a rebrand. The name in English stayed the same, but in Chinese the show’s name changed from China Has Hip-Hop to China Has ‘Shuochang,’ a term that also refers to traditional forms of storytelling. Regulators had given the go-ahead for hip-hop to continue its growth in China, but artists had to obey the government censors. Hip-hop had to stay away from mentions of drugs and sex. Otherwise, though, it could proceed.

“It was a success for the Chinese regulators,” Amar says. “They really succeeded in coopting the hip-hop artists.”

With tight censorship on the entertainment industry and a ban on mentions of drugs and sex in lyrics, artists have reacted in two ways. Either they wholeheartedly embrace the displays of patriotism and nationalism or they avoid the topics.

Some, like GAI, have fully taken on the government’s mantle in the mainstreaming of hip-hop. He had won The Rap of China with a song called Not Friendly in which, in classic hip-hop fashion, he dissed other rappers. Just a few years later, Gai is singing about China’s glorious 5,000 years of history on the CCTV’s Spring Festival New Year’s Gala broadcast.

The red lines have also pushed artists to be more creative. But developing a genuine Chinese brand of rap remains a work in progress. Hip-hop got its start from New York’s boroughs of Brooklyn and the Bronx, where rappers made music from their tough circumstances. In China, the challenge is about finding what fits its context.

Wang Yitai, who was a member of Chengdu’s rap collective CDC, is now one of the most popular rappers in China. His style has infused mainstream pop sounds.

“We’re all trying hard to create songs that not only sound good, but also topics that fit for China,” Wang says. “I think hip-hop’s spirit will always be about original creation and will always be about your own story.”
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LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY — Twenty horses stampeding toward the first turn in a battle for position. A screaming crowd of 150,000 and maybe some showers that dampen the Churchill Downs dirt strip.

It’s the 150th Kentucky Derby. Beyond a couple early wagering favorites, it’s a wide-open race.

Post time is 6:57 p.m. Saturday. The forecast calls for 27 Celsius (81 Fahrenheit) with a 60% chance of scattered showers and thunderstorms.

That kind of weather could benefit six horses that have won in the mud or slop before, including early favorites Fierceness and Sierra Leone. The others with experience on messy surfaces are Dornoch, Just a Touch, Mystik Dan and Society Man.

The Derby will answer the perennial question of which 3-year-old can best handle running 1¼ miles in front of the biggest crowd they will ever see and hear.

Fierceness and jockey John Velazquez will break from the No. 17 post, which has never produced a derby winner.

The costliest colt in the 20-horse field is Sierra Leone at $2.3 million.

“A lot of times you buy an expensive horse like that, and they can’t run,” said Peter Brandt, one of the six owners. “We’ve very, very lucky he’s made it this far. We’re looking forward to this race but also looking forward to the future of taking care of this horse.”

Conversely, Larry Demeritte shelled out just $11,000 to buy Saratoga West. The 74-year-old Bahamas native has won 180 races and nearly $5 million in purse money since he started training in 1984. Demeritte is just the second Black trainer since 1951 to saddle a horse for the derby.

“This is truly amazing how we got to this position with this horse,” he said.

The Derby winner earns $3.1 million from the record purse of $5 million.

For the second straight year, Japan has two entries: Forever Young and T O Password. The country has never won the race.

This year’s race is one for the ages, too. D. Wayne Lukas, the 88-year-old trainer with four derby wins, saddles Just Steel. Frankie Dettori, the famed Italian jockey, is back to ride Society Man at age 53 after a 24-year absence.

Trainer Todd Pletcher, who saddles Fierceness, is in the derby for the 24th year and it never gets old. He’s won it twice.

“If anything, it just becomes more nerve-wracking,” he said.
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KASHAN, Iran — The historic Kashan bazaar in central Iran once sat on a major caravan route, its silk carpets known the world over. But for the weavers trying to sell their rugs under its ancient arches, their world has only unraveled since the collapse of Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers and wider tensions with the West.

Rug exports, which exceeded $2 billion two decades ago, have plummeted to less than $50 million in the last year in the Persian calendar that ended in March, according to government customs figures. With fewer tourists coming and difficulties rising in making international transactions, Iranian rugs are going unsold as some weavers work for as little as $4 a day.

“Americans were some of our best customers,” said Ali Faez, the owner of one dusty carpet shop at the bazaar. “Rugs are a luxury product and they were eager to buy it and they used to make very good purchases. Unfortunately, this has been cut — and the connection between the two countries for visitors to come and go has gone away.”

Kashan’s rug-weaving industry has been inscribed in UNESCO’s list of the world’s “intangible cultural heritage.” Many of the weavers are women, with the skills needed for the Farsi weaving style passed down from generation to generation, using materials like vine leaves and the skins of pomegranate fruit and walnuts to make the dyes for their threads. A single rug can take months to make.

For decades, Western tourists and others would pass through Iran, picking up rugs as gifts and to take back home. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the U.S. increased sanctions on Iran’s theocratic government over the U.S. Embassy siege, Tehran’s links to militant attacks and other issues.

But in 2000, the outgoing administration of former President Bill Clinton lifted a ban on the import of Iranian caviar, rugs and pistachios.

“Iran lives in a dangerous neighborhood,” then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said at the time. “We welcome efforts to make it less dangerous.”

By 2010, with concerns rising over Iran’s nuclear program, the U.S. again banned Iranian-made Persian rugs. But in 2015, Iran struck a nuclear deal with world powers which greatly reduced and drastically lowered the purity of Tehran’s stockpile of enriched uranium. The rug trade was allowed once again.

Three years later, in 2018, then-President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from the nuclear deal. Since then, Iran began enriching uranium at near-weapons-grade levels and has been blamed for a series of attacks at sea and on land, including an unprecedented drone-and-missile attack targeting Israel last month.

For the carpet weavers, that’s meant their wares were once again banned under U.S. law.

“It started when Trump signed that paper,” Faez told The Associated Press, referring to the renewed sanctions. “He ruined everything.”

Abdullah Bahrami, the head of a national syndicate for handwoven rug producers, also blamed the collapse of the industry on the Trump sanctions. He put the value of exports to the U.S. as high as $80 million annually prior to the sanctions.

“The whole world used to know Iran by its rugs,” Bahrami told the state-run IRNA news agency in March.

Making things worse is what carpet sellers see as a drop in tourists to Kashan as well. High-value American and European tourism in Iran has largely stopped, the daily Shargh newspaper warned last year. Ezzatollah Zarghami, Iran’s minister of tourism, insisted in April that 6 million tourists visited the country over the last 12 months, though that likely includes religious pilgrims as well as Afghans and Iraqis with less spending money.

But even those tourists that do show up face the challenge of Iran’s financial system, where no major international credit card works.

“I had a Chinese customer the other week. He was struggling to somehow make the payment because he loved the rug and didn’t want to let go of it,” Faez said. “We have to pay a lot of commission to those who can transfer money and have bank accounts abroad. Sometimes they cancel their orders because they don’t have enough cash with them.”

The collapse of the rial currency has left many Iranians also unable to purchase the handwoven rugs. Wages in the industry are low, leading to a growing number of Afghan migrants working in workshops around Kashan as well.

Designer Javad Amorzesh, one of just a few of Kashan’s old-school artists, said his orders have fallen from 10 a year to just two. He has laid off staff and now works alone in a cramped space.

“Inflation rose every hour. People were hit repeatedly by inflation,” he said. “I used to have four to five assistants in a big workshop.”

Offering a bitter laugh alone in his workshop, he added, “We’ve been left isolated.”
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PARIS — Freshly cooked bread, select cheeses and a broad veggie offer will be among the meals to be offered to athletes and visitors during the 2024 Paris Olympics — including, of course, gourmet dishes created by renowned French chefs.

About 40,000 meals are expected to be served each day during the Games to the more than 15,000 athletes from 200 different countries housed at the Olympic village.

Visitors, too, will be able to enjoy some specially created snacks at the different venues.

French food services company Sodexo Live!, which was selected to oversee the catering at the athletes’ village and 14 venues of the Paris Games, said it has created a total of 500 recipes, which will notably be offered at a sit-down eatery for up to 3,500 athletes at the village, meant to be the “world’s largest restaurant.”

“Of course, there will be some classics for athletes, like pasta,” said Nathalie Bellon-Szabo, global CEO of Sodexo Live! But the food will have a “very French touch.”

Athletes will also have access to “grab and go” food stands, including one dedicated exclusively to French cuisine cooked up by chefs.

Renowned French chef Amandine Chaignot, who runs a restaurant and a café-bistro in Paris, on Tuesday unveiled one of her recipes based on the iconic croissant.

“I wanted the recipe I suggested to be representative of the French terroir, but I wanted athletes to enjoy it at the same time,” she told The Associated Press. “It was quite obvious for me to make a croissant that I could twist. So, you have a bit of artichoke puree, a poached egg, a bit of truffle and a bit of cheese. It’s both vegetarian and still mouthwatering.”

Every day, during the July 26-August 11 Games, a top chef — including some awarded with Michelin stars — will cook in front of the athletes at the Olympic Village, “so they’ll be able to chat and better understand what French cuisine is about — and to understand a bit of our culture as well,” Chaignot said.

Daily specials will be accompanied by a wide range of salads, pastas, grilled meat and soups. Cheeses will include top quality camembert, brie and sheep’s milk-based Ossau-Iraty from southwestern France.

The Olympic Village will also feature a boulangerie producing fresh baguettes and a variety of other breads.

“The idea is to offer athletes the chance to grab a piping-hot baguette for breakfast,” said baker Tony Doré, who will be working at the Olympic Village’s main restaurant.

Athletes will even be able to participate in daily bakery trainings, and learn to make their own French baguette, said Doré.

In an effort to provide as many options as possible, meals offered will revolve around four cuisines: French, Asian, African and the Caribbean and international food.

Paris 2024 organizers have promised to make the Games more sustainable and environment-friendly — and that includes efforts to reduce the use of plastic. To this effect, the main restaurant at the village will use only reusable dishes.

Additionally, organizers say all meals will be based on seasonal products and 80% will come from France.

Plant-based food will represent 60% of the offer for visitors at the venues, including a “vegetarian hot-dog,” said Philipp Würz, head of Food and Beverage for the Paris 2024 Committee.

There’s “a huge amount of plant-based recipes that will be available for the general public to try, to experience and, hopefully, they will love it,” said Würz.

The urban park at the Place de la Concorde, in central Paris, will offer visitors 100% vegetarian food — a first in the Games’ history. The place will be the stage for Paris 2024’s most contemporary sporting disciplines: BMX freestyle, 3×3 basketball, skateboarding and breakdancing.
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LYPIVKA, Ukraine — This Orthodox Easter season, an extraordinary new church is bringing spiritual comfort to war-weary residents of the Ukrainian village of Lypivka. Two years ago, it also provided physical refuge from the horrors outside.

Almost 100 residents sheltered in a basement chapel at the Church of the Intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary while Russian troops occupied the village in March 2022 as they closed in on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, 60 kilometers to the east.

“The fighting was right here,” the Rev. Hennadii Kharkivskyi said. He pointed to the churchyard, where a memorial stone commemorates six Ukrainian soldiers killed in the battle for Lypivka.

“They were injured and then the Russians came and shot each one, finished them off,” he said.

The two-week Russian occupation left the village shattered and the church itself — a modern replacement for an older structure — damaged while still under construction. It’s one of 129 war-damaged Ukrainian religious sites recorded by UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural organization.

“It’s solid concrete,” the priest said. “But it was pierced easily” by Russian shells, which blasted holes in the church and left a wall inside pockmarked with shrapnel scars. At the bottom of the basement staircase, a black scorch mark shows where a grenade was lobbed down.

But within weeks, workers were starting to repair the damage and work to finish the solid building topped by red domes that towers over the village, with its scarred and damaged buildings, blooming fruit trees and fields that the Russians left littered with land mines.

For many of those involved — including a tenacious priest, a wealthy philanthropist, a famous artist and a team of craftspeople — rebuilding this church plays a part in Ukraine’s struggle for culture, identity and its very existence. The building, a striking fusion of the ancient and the modern, reflects a country determined to express its soul even in wartime.

The building’s austere exterior masks a blaze of color inside. The vibrant red, blue, orange and gold panels decorating walls and ceiling are the work of Anatoliy Kryvolap, an artist whose bold, modernist images of saints and angels make this church unique in Ukraine.

The 77-year-old Kryvolap, whose abstract paintings sell for tens of thousands of dollars at auction, said that he wanted to eschew the severe-looking icons he’d seen in many Orthodox churches.

“It seems to me that going to church to meet God should be a celebration,” he said.

There has been a church on this site for more than 300 years. An earlier building was destroyed by shelling during World War II. The small wooden church that replaced it was put to more workaday uses in Soviet times, when religion was suppressed.

Kharkivskyi reopened the parish in 1992 following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and set about rebuilding the church, spiritually and physically, with funding from Bohdan Batrukh, a Ukrainian film producer and distributor.

Work stopped when Russian troops launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Moscow’s forces reached the fringes of Kyiv before being driven back. Lypivka was liberated by the start of April.

Since then, fighting has been concentrated in the east and south of Ukraine, though aerial attacks with rockets, missiles and drones are a constant threat across the country.

By May 2022, workers had resumed work on the church. It has been slow going. Millions of Ukrainians fled the country when war erupted, including builders and craftspeople. Hundreds of thousands of others have joined the military.

Inside the church, a tower of wooden scaffolding climbs up to the dome, where a red and gold image of Christ raises a hand in blessing.

For now, services take place in the smaller basement, where the priest, in white and gold robes, recently conducted a service for a couple of dozen parishioners as the smell of incense wafted through the candlelit room.

He is expecting a large crowd for Easter, which falls on Sunday. Eastern Orthodox Christians usually celebrate Easter later than Catholic and Protestant churches, because they use a different method of calculating the date for the holy day that marks Christ’s resurrection.

A majority of Ukrainians identify as Orthodox Christians, though the church is divided. Many belong to the independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine, with which the Lypivka church is affiliated. The rival Ukrainian Orthodox Church was loyal to the patriarch in Moscow until splitting from Russia after the 2022 invasion and is viewed with suspicion by many Ukrainians.

Kharkivskyi says the size of his congregation has remained stable even though the population of the village has shrunk dramatically since the war began. In tough times, he says, people turn to religion.

“Like people say: ‘Air raid alert — go see God,’” the priest said wryly.

Liudmyla Havryliuk, who has a summer home in Lypivka, found herself drawn back to the village and its church even before the fighting stopped. When Russia invaded, she drove to Poland with her daughters, then 16 and 18 years old. But within weeks she came back to the village she loves, still besieged by the Russians.

The family hunkered down in their home, cooking with firewood, drawing water from a well, sometimes under Russian fire. Havryliuk said that when they saw Russian helicopters, they held hands and prayed.

“Not prayer in strict order, like in the book,” she said. “It was from my heart, from my soul, about what should we do? How can I save myself and especially my daughters?”

She goes to Lypivka’s church regularly, saying it’s a “place you can shelter mentally, within yourself.”

As Ukraine marks its third Easter at war, the church is nearing completion. Only a few of Kryvolap’s interior panels remain to be installed. He said that the shell holes will be left unrepaired as a reminder to future generations.

“(It’s) so that they will know what kind of ‘brothers’ we have, that these are just fascists,” he said, referring to the Russians.

“We are Orthodox, just like them, but destroying churches is something inhumane.”
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