'Do We Dare To Dream?': Films On Ukraine War That Delve Beyond Despair

In her 1996 classic Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, Oksana Zabuzhko writes, “The Ukrainian choice is between non-existence and an existence that kills you.” A swell of documentary deep dives—some direct, others lateral­—has burst out of Ukraine in the aftermath of the Russian occupation, which began in February 2022. They are searching, mournful examinations on the “Ukrainian choice”. The best documentaries curl underneath hard-nosed facts and numbers to propose a gutting, psychological, emotional immersion.

Oksana Karpovych’s Intercepted (2024) pushes into and grapples with the psyche of on-ground Russian soldiers deployed in Ukraine. The film opens north of Kyiv, before heading south and east, ostensibly mirroring the trajectory of the invasion as it unfurled. Karpovych was working as a producer for Al Jazeera in the country when Russia invaded Ukraine. Ukrainian security forces intercepted the radio transmissions among the on-ground Russian soldiers. These included calls they made to their families back home. Soon, these were publicly released. Karpovych scoured through 30 hours of audio clips and set out with a minimal crew, capturing the desolation seeping through the war-torn land. The film assembles calls intercepted from March to November 2022, placing them against a visual and geographical tour of Ukraine.

The dissonance between sound and image weaves something profoundly disturbing. As the calls are transposed against seemingly mundane scenes of Ukrainians getting through the day, there’s a deep sense of alienation and emotional purgation at play. It is as if our healthy, empathetic response to immense cruelty is being tested and our capacity to endure a barrage of violence every day is being assessed.

There are no overt embodiments of violence in the film. Rather, a spectre hangs over its milieu. It’s in the marks on the places—a residual sense of the carnage that has billowed through every corner of the country. Houses look like they have been hurriedly vacated.

In the calls, what registers especially is a tussle between the Russian entitlement to their horrific deeds and the gradual fraying of their souls. Soldiers seek reassurance from the women in their families—mothers and wives—to insist on the righteousness of their occupation. None of the men sounds zealous or charged about duty. They have hurled themselves into the deep end of things so as to hasten about an end to duty and return home. They liken their mission to foraging in the dark. But since they committed to it, there’s no turning back. To angle for retreat or escape amounts to reneging, risking being slain by one’s own men.

In interviews, Karpovych emphasises, “War is also a lot about silence and waiting, and this horrible sense of time being suspended.” Much of the violence perpetrated by the forces is just to expedite the homecoming, the soldiers imply.

However, it’s not clear to them what they are liberating. Why did they capture Ukraine? What “cause” are they, anyway, fighting for, they ask, defeat and cynical amusement bosoming the question. They are aware that people don’t matter to Putin. “It’s all about conquest of land,” one asserts, while his wife exhorts him against such gloom and resignation. Often, the cold logic of those waiting at home for their loved ones to return from the battlefield cuts deeper than sites of ravage. Soldiers’ wives and mothers spur them on to steal as many things as possible—make-up, sneakers, laptops and vitamins: “Take everything.”

How does the artillery of the State propaganda get so entrenched in the minds of citizens’ inhumanity, signed off under protectionism? When a soldier’s disillusionment rings through, their partner feels the moral imperative to remind them of the necessity of their acts, even if it’s brutal. A mother shot at while on a walk with her kids is also rationalised. “A mother is the enemy, too,” a soldier’s wife underlines with gentle matter-of-factness. The documentary, however, is cautious and sceptical in dovetailing measures of compassion among the Russians for the Ukrainians. There’s extreme loathing and envy at the seeming material plenitude the Ukrainians may have been vested with as opposed to them. The Russian forces, of course, drew heavy conscriptions from poverty-stricken areas. Their initial sense of duty funnelled from this rage and bitterness. Nevertheless, it can’t run the entire course.

A Sense of the Future

If Intercepted refuses explicit utterance to the Ukrainian perspective, dwelling laterally instead, another documentary, Olha Zhurba’s Songs of Slow Burning Earth (2024), spells it out directly and unambiguously. One of the latter’s insistent, urgent scenes arrives in the concluding section. At a high school, several thousands of miles from the frontline, students are asked, “Do we have the right to dream, to feel joy, while Ukraine is at war?” It’s a piercing question, but answers come swift: A resounding yes. An invitation to envisage the future of Ukraine ensues. However, rather than a sweeping span, the Ukrainians perceive their future within a more immediate window. It’s not a matter of decades yet to come, but an appraisal of a couple of years. They can’t look beyond a shrunk notion of time. Nonetheless, the onus to imagine the future can be borne only by them. Peace, a creatively flourishing country with no tight borders, development and freedom—this is what the youths yearn for. “What are you willing to do for it to become that?” the teacher asks. Right after, elsewhere at a Russian state school, youths receive military training. The juxtaposition hits with immediacy.

Moving subsequently farther from the frontline, ranging through evacuees’ assembly points and outgoing trains packed to the hilt, Songs of Slow Burning Earth slows down in these few precise, considered climactic minutes. Throughout the film, we are let into conversations about blocked routes, families lamenting the loss of their homes and roots, entire cities being razed and witness kids play with debris even as raid alerts rent the air. Surrounded by carnage and hatred and suffering, how does one imagine a hopeful possibility?

(This appeared in the print as 'Sculpting In Time - Debanjan Dhar')