Issue 1. Grief and Healing

In her 2024 film Intercepted, Oksana Karpovych combines the audio tracks of phone conversations Russian soldiers had with relatives back in Russia while they waged war, and the silent video footage of Ukrainian villages, towns and landscapes once these were liberated.

We asked another Ukrainian filmmaker, Yuriy Hrytsyna, to reflect on this work. His own 2015 film, Varta1. Lviv, Ukraine, indeed plays on similar contrasts: it blends audio material from conversations among 2014 Maidan activists in Lviv with video footage of the city’s industrial outskirts, filmed one year later.

This piece looks at how documentary cinema impacts us in times of war, post-truth and the overflow of imagery.

On April 10, 2022 Oksana Karpovych made an entry in her journal, excerpts from which would later be published by a German publishing house Suhrkamp as part of the anthology titled From the Fog of War: “Even now, after Russian tanks have left the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions, and we are driving through liberated towns every day, my brain still impulsively searches for evidence of their presence when I see burnt-out cars and even burnt-out Russian soldiers within those cars. Nonsense. What other kind of evidence is necessary? A helpless, uncontrollable symptom produced by eight years of living in a reality in which Russia denied the very presence of its troops in our East. Black pelvises of Russian soldiers, scorched machinery and land on the sides of roads, poor pine trees won’t tell [anything about this presence].”

In her film Intercepted (in Ukraine, released under the title Peaceful People), Karpovych shows dead nature, nature morte, devastation. Sometimes people emerge in these landscapes, interacting with them in a certain way. These are the scenes when Intercepted seems like a homage to one of the most important documentaries on the post-Soviet space — From the East (1993) by Chantal Akerman. Without a single comment, Akerman’s camera travels through Poland and Ukraine in the direction of Russia in 1992, showing us the movement of bodies at a time when history came into motion again. The chaotic journey through night streets of Lviv to the music of Braty Hadiukiny in the background and the camera frozen in apartment spaces speak to that intention. For the most part of Akerman’s film, the camera drives through Moscow’s suburbs at night, looking closely at queues near bus stops. People look at the camera — some with mistrust but most with apathy. Someone says: “Why make a video? Ask us. And we will tell you.” A moment of weakness of the empire, a moment of uncertainty. (Having watched the film, Jean-Luc Godard commented that one shouldn’t film poverty the way Akerman did.) In 2022, when Russian soldiers got the opportunity to show themselves to the whole world through selfie videos, writing on walls and social media posts, we suddenly understood what those people in Moscow, thirty years earlier, might have wanted to tell about themselves.

These days, everyone’s a little bit of an OSINT nerd, an anthropologist, an observer. Maybe this is the reason why so many social media communities in the Ukrainian segment of Telegram contain the phrase “Overheard in…” in their title? In Intercepted, Karpovych works with archived audio material, although she was unable to access all the unedited recordings of Russian soldiers’conversations intercepted by Ukraine’s intelligence services. She edits already dissected and filtered material, acting as an intermediary between the evidence of war crimes collected by Ukraine’s secret services and viewers who can take on the role of judges. We can hardly imagine what the entire archive is like, and what kind of film would be possible if one had the chance to listen to and use thousands of hours of the original interceptions. Would that scope have helped to reveal the banal mechanics of evil in some other way, an evil which has become everyday life? Would we have dealt with a boundless mass of repetitive material and, thus, would we be risking to “drink water from a fire hydrant”?

Intercepted is shot from a distance, with restraint and tranquility. This might be the most laconic film about the current war. According to Karpovych, her film emerged from the experience of long gazing into the spaces of war when she helped Western TV reporters with their work. That’s how we understand that the film is closer to the observation tradition of James Benning — a classic of American experimental sensory cinema, which slowly takes in landscapes — rather than to Mstyslav Chernov’s journalistic films.

Images of Intercepted are in a dialogue with all the other images we’ve already seen over the years. Watching the long, almost empty shots taken by Karpovych, we imagine the situations that preceded them. We imagine the enemy’s approach to the city, the deployment of fire teams, the beginning of a shelling and its fire adjustment. We imagine what an apartment might have looked like in a moment of shelling. We imagine a person injured, evacuated or killed. We imagine all that because we have seen every detail and every angle multiple times. Most of us have seen it in the form of images: on Telegram channels, on Telemarathon, on Facebook. Is there any sense in repeatedly showing something that each time looks different, yet somehow the same?

With the inflation of visuals, with the “pornographic” overflow of images of devastation (“the most documented war in the history of humanity”), language has become a place, where things, experienced and seen, are being apprehended. Could this be the reason why poets and playwrights were the quickest and profoundest in their reactions to the war, and why the Lviv Center for Urban History started archiving diaries, dreams and Telegram channels?

Intercepted is a testimonial film, but from all possible testimonies — of a victim, an observer, a combatant — Karpovych draws on the least reliable one: a soldier’s description of himself in a private conversation. What we hear are not recordings of intercepted field radio communications, not “work-related” discussions (“work” is a term which the Russian military like the most, judging by the numerous video and audio recordings). Instead, we actually hear how soldiers would like to present themselves to their families, how they reflect on their experiences. The fact that the women they talk to mostly don't object to the soldiers’ stories, and their choices of words, says more about the state of the Russian society than any opinion poll or analytical opinion piece. The “peaceful people” featured in the film’s Ukrainian title are indeed the peaceful people of Russia.

During World War II, the USA and the UK set up a number of special camps tasked with listening to conversations between German prisoners of war. Researching hundreds of thousands of pages with transcribed conversations, German historian Sönke Neitzel concluded that this source revealed the German soldier’s inner world to the fullest. In contrast to letters sent home in which the military attempted to lighten up frontline reality, it was in their communications with other soldiers that they openly and in detail discussed the regular abuse of civilians. After analyzing POW’s statements, Neitzel concludes that these exchanges took place in established reference frameworks (e.g. “military service”) in which certain patterns of behavior were not just acceptable but expected.

Almost every conversation in Karpovych’s film runs smoothly, as an exchange of predictable information within the usual coordinates established over years of social legitimization. The peaceful people of Russia whose voices we hear have the same reference frames as Russian soldiers. They see this war as a geopolitical clash with no alternative. They believe this is a war of “liberation” and, at the same time, aimed at conquering as much territory and resources as possible. Ukrainian civilians are perceived as potential partisans who can’t be trusted. When it comes to fighting the “partisans”, the soldiers’ interlocutors in Russia are justifying the usage of any means of terror, including torture, rape and executions. The realization that this whole set of beliefs smoothly fits into the worldview of people who had never had any relation to military actions, comes gradually. Yet, it crucially distinguishes Intercepted from many films about the horrors of war so common in the world of conventional documentary cinema.

Karpovych’s film can also be seen as an extension of the wave of found footage cinema, one of the important phenomena of experimental documentary filmmaking in post-Maidan Ukraine. Working with found footage, one can have different results. One can turn a film into an emotional carousel comparable to scrolling through social media, as in The Hardest Hour (2024) by Alan Badoev. One can abandon the obvious narration structure and create an intellectually precise and visually intriguing statement, as Roman Liubyi did in Iron Butterflies (2023). Some work with found vernacular footage with the pickiness of archivists, like Andrii Rachynskyi and Daniil Revkovskyi, whose video project titled Civilians. Invasion was part of the Ukrainian pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. One can work as Oleksii Radynskyi and Taras Spivak as participants of the Kinotron collective do: with the material of “Kyivnaukfilm”, the Soviet film studio, using montage to reveal the colonial unconscious of the documentary material, commissioned and censored by the state. 

The power of found footage montage cinema lies in the ability to demagnetize ideologies and meanings that are embedded in materials created with certain intentions in the specific context. The anonymous authors of the five-hour video essay To Watch a War, for example, try to raise a number of questions about the nature of mediatized war, desynchronizing the image and sound of videos filmed in the anti-terrorist operation zone in 2014–2018.

All these films have one thing in common: they have no characters, no protagonists, no narrators. They speak for history, rather than for individual stories or collectives. They work with borrowed material whose authorship often cannot be established, saving it from oblivion. These films are moving forward not through dialogue but rather through the force of friction, magnetization and the ability of the different particles of the film to repel each other. It appears that the montage, in its ability to extract the footage from its context, becomes the most productive form of reacting to a situation when the certainty, linearity, obviousness are lost. 

Oksana Karpovych talks about something similar in her diary, noting: “Roads, paths, soils, lack of roads or unusable roads connecting places, — those are missing descriptions. War and terror are about these endless connections, an ooze of connections, dead ends; about the own geography suddenly becoming a labyrinth. Millions of people rushed through it. War is about the impossibility of escaping, the impossibility of straight running as such. The waters we’ve been in thousands of times have suddenly become dangerous, — we no longer know those waters. The bottom we explored all our lives, the stones we bypassed — we no longer know this bottom nor those stones. Trees can no longer protect us from the sun and dust. Missiles comb them away like blades. The road no longer takes us home because fear twists it. February and March, ferocious March, somehow gluing together days, places, and thoughts.”

The impersonal monotonous language of Intercepted in which it’s difficult to distinguish separate characters, and each narrator seems similar to the previous one, comes into conflict with the reality of the landscape, someone’s home, present or former.

Towards the end of the film, we see Russian prisoners of war. Unlike the Muscovites in Akerman’s film, they try to pretend not to notice the camera. In its final credits, Intercepted indicates that the faces of these POWs were altered by digital technologies. Most likely, this was done for legal reasons, but the question arises: how important is it to see a specific prisoner of war and know their particular story in order to understand, feel and believe? If the film would be an item of evidence in an investigation, then the episode with POWs would indeed be a strong precondition for the truthfulness of the film. However, Karpovych’s film does not work with circumstances, details or proof. It rather reconstructs what is now commonly called vibe. The vibe of the “adventure” of the first months of the invasion; the vibe of the daily routine of occupation; the vibe of immersion in a war with its ever-changing objectives; the vibe of a male collective which has been allowed to forget the rules of hated everyday life at home.

Perhaps that’s why the decision to use this footage of prisoners of war can cause something of a discomfort. With the transition from a faceless collective to separate individuals, the film loses the bigger picture which reveals the connection between words, ideas, and actions.

Intercepted was released at a time when AI voice models reached a new peak of development. From now on, it will be increasingly easier to question the authenticity of any material. “Nothing is true and everything is possible.” We all have to learn how to navigate the world of uncontrollable visuality multiplied by wide outreach and cheerful nihilism; the world where neither authorship nor authority matter anymore; the world where the word “witness” has already acquired new meanings. Losing faith in cinema as evidence that can change the course of events, perhaps it is worth thinking about cinema as a space where one can discuss the form of memory and the form of justice.

Oksana Karpovych’s film opens this conversation, where there can be no exclusively true intonations, rhythms or vocabularies.

Translated from Ukrainian by Anastasiia Mednikova

Illustration: film still from Intercepted © Christopher Nann