Dancing Through Darkness in Kyiv: Joe Hill’s Match in a Haystack
A story of art, war, and the power of creation in the face of chaos.
Read history books, or news for that matter, and the entire human experience can start to look like one dark sky full of violence, with a rare few stars of progress thrown in.
To be sure, humanity’s past and present are full of inhumanity. Our shared story is full of conflict and literally unimaginable suffering. And tragically, the hinge points of global history are indeed defined by instability and chaos of many awful flavors.
But there’s something else equally true: that the simple acts of connection and creativity, the care and hope and community that make this whole world go around...rarely make the news or history books.
If it bleeds, it leads. The better angels of human nature rarely make it to the headlines of history.
Which is easy to say from the comfort of a computer.
It’s harder to say for someone like Joe Hill, a five-time Emmy Award-winning conflict journalist who’s witnessed some of the 21st century’s most brutal moments firsthand. Joe worked for VICE for nearly a decade. He’s been beaten by anarchists for his reportage, huddled under shellfire in Nagorno-Karabakh, won the trust of mutinous militias in Burkina Faso, embedded with US Special Forces, and more.
He’s risked his life many times over to document the kinds of hell on Earth most of us can barely stand to see in our daily feed, to render visible the impact of conflict on those caught in its chaos.
And yet.
Along this dangerous way, Joe gleaned something remarkable. Something that most news reports and nearly all statistics miss. Namely, that even in this world’s darkest and most violent corners, joy and compassion and creativity can still flower in the human heart.
And that, too, deserves a place in the history book.
This is the conviction that’s guided Joe’s life and career. And the seed from which his newest documentary, Match In A Haystack, grew.
A hard-hitting piece of true-life poetry, Match In A Haystack follows the women of a Kyiv-based modern dance troupe on their journey to create something amidst the destruction Russia continues to inflict on Ukraine.
It tells the stories of dancers like Ghala Petka and Nadine Kupets, the director-choreographer Yuliia Lopata, and the rest of Kyiv’s Pro Contemporary dance troupe as they grapple with not just wartime realities, but the choice to pursue their passion in a time of such pain.
As Joe said in our interview this week, “I don't think [Match In A Haystack] is a Ukraine war film. I think that it's a universal film about the act of creation, the sense of purpose, a sense of duty. The question of: are you as a person entitled to feel something as simple as joy?”
This wrenching, triumphant piece of cinema premiered last night, with more showings in NYC and DC coming soon.
We spoke with Joe the day before the premiere about his experiences as a conflict journalist, his hard-won and deeply human view on a world full of inhumanity, and how Match In A Haystack moved from wild idea to even-wilder reality.
We’ve formatted our conversation into the below as-told-by to minimize interruption, and will publish the second half in next week’s installment of The Cure.
I’m Joe Hill, director and producer of Match In a Haystack. I lived in New York for about nine years but recently moved to Los Angeles. I’m from Colorado, and until about a year ago I was working as a conflict journalist, producer and shooter for Vice News.
I was an actor when I was younger, then moved into theater directing. But I gravitated toward documentary film because of the emotional truth it allowed for. The way it tapped into the human perspective at the center of events. I loved theater and studied directing, and I realized that story is story—whether on stage or on screen. But film allowed me to capture not just history, but what it felt like to live through it.
There was a really profound moment for me when I was studying abroad in college. I had grown up watching the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan on TV: images of burnt-out streets, unbelievable danger.
On that trip, I was walking through a street in Istanbul, having this incredible experience of the place. Then, a few days later, I saw on the news that there’d been a bombing on that very same street. That was the first time I had seen a place before it was destroyed, and it broke my understanding of how the world works. I realized that destruction isn’t the story—life is the story. The only reason we see these places on the news is because they changed. There was life, community, meaning—before.
That experience opened my eyes to how deeply misunderstood the world can be. Documenting was a way to participate in that to record history not just in facts, but in feeling. Framing someone in the center of a moment and articulating how it felt to be alive—that’s a historical record. And I wanted to be part of that.
I never saw myself as a hard news guy. I wasn’t counting bombs or tracking troop movements. I wasn’t trying to do the White House beat.
When you're in a war zone, you have to ask yourself: What am I doing here that has value? Why am I putting my life on the line? What can I offer that’s different?
For me, it became about creating an emotional, immersive record of what it feels like to live through conflict.
I believe history should be understood from the perspective of those who are affected—not the policymakers, but the people absorbing the consequences. It’s always about the people who have no choice but to be there. If I could capture those consequences honestly, then it didn't matter what the political framing was. Reality speaks for itself.
I learned that lesson early in my career. I was in Chile and covering a protest that quickly escalated. Anarchists were throwing Molotovs, police were firing tear gas and water cannons—I was right in it. I thought, this is what it means to be a conflict journalist. But then the protestors saw me taking photos. They chased me down, stole my gear, beat me. I was thrown to the ground, kicked in the ribs. It was chaos.
And then this woman—this mom—rushed in and pulled me out. She brought me to a group of other women who wiped the blood off my face, gave me lemon to soothe the tear gas in my throat. I asked who they were. She said, “I’m a mom. My kid’s an activist. We're out here protesting to make Chile better. And idiots like you get hurt, so we come out and look after you.”
I left that day bruised, gear stolen, and with no photos. But it was the clearest lesson: if I had been documenting the consequences instead of the violence—if I’d been with those women—that would have been the story. It would’ve been the most meaningful thing I could’ve shown.
From then on, that idea became the core of my approach. Whether I was covering conflict in Somalia, Burkina Faso, or elsewhere, my goal was always to center human experience.
In Somalia, my team became the first set of journalists to embed with U.S.-trained special forces. It forced AFRICOM to publicly address drone strikes and operations they were carrying out in places the U.S. had never declared war.
In Burkina Faso, I went alone after a military coup to embed with the group of mutinous soldiers who led the coup. I was told access was impossible. The last team that tried was ambushed and killed.
But I met with the new leaders and told them: If you claim you’re solving a problem, you have to show us. They agreed. The footage we captured was so revealing that the U.S. State Department reached out—they hadn’t seen what we saw.
Other times, it was about something more intimate. In April 2020, at the height of COVID, I embedded with a paramedic in Detroit and her partner. We told a story about love under pressure—two people who knew that just being close could kill them, but did it anyway. That felt as urgent as anything I’d ever reported.
The most volatile situation I ever covered as a reporter was in Nagorno-Karabakh. We got there around day three of the 2020 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. It’s a conflict that’s been going on for decades, but this specific operation had just begun.
We arrived in a small valley town with a pretty limited population, and right away it was clear the situation was not viable. The capital, Stepanakert, was getting heavily bombarded. We realized quickly that we were embedded with the losing side of the war. That first night, probably 80% of the other journalists left. It just wasn’t safe to be there. But we stayed.
We saw families desperately trying to get on buses to evacuate. There weren’t enough seats, so people were literally putting their kids—toddlers—on the buses alone, just hoping someone would take care of them on the other end. It was a hard situation.
We had some local journalists helping us—one was translating, another went out to do his own reporting. They were a young couple, probably in their early twenties. One night we were filming in a mutual aid center—there was food, some supplies—and the power had gone out. We had no communication. The shelling went on through the night. The journalist who was with us was really scared for his partner.
And then, in the middle of all that, she walked in. He jumped up and they hugged for a long time. It really stuck with me. That moment said a lot about what was at stake—what people were holding onto.
After I got back from that trip, I remember feeling different. I used to sing in the shower, just casually, without thinking about it. But after that experience, I opened my mouth and couldn’t. It’s hard to describe. Something just felt changed.
When the war in Ukraine started, my colleagues and I were doing the same stories we always do—refugees, bombings, mass graves. Important stories. But I remember thinking: This can't be the whole record. If we’re documenting history, it can’t be just death and destruction. I know that isn’t the whole truth. I’ve been to these places. I’ve seen what remains.
So I pitched this crazy idea: What if we made the definitive historical record of creation during wartime, instead of destruction?
That was the start of Match In a Haystack.
Part two drops next week. In the meantime, Match in a Haystack is a reminder that even in the worst of times, people keep creating. To learn more, including where to watch it, click here.
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