Since the beginning of the Russian invasion in 2022, the Ukrainian secret services have captured and then issued thousands of excerpts among Russian soldiers on the front and their loved ones and offered a disturbing approach to their psychological state and gravitational crimes committed against Ukrainians. In your document CapturedCo -producing in Quebec Cosmos Films, Canada filmmaker in Karpovych offers a freezing dive at the core of this war by combining these recordings and images of the destruction of her native country. He will return to the Genesis of this film, which will take a poster on Friday after remarkable passages on La Berlinale and international documentary meetings of Montreal.
“When I have to think about life before the war, it’s always very difficult,” admits the filmmaker with emotions when he was asked to describe the days of the previous conflict. “Things have changed so quickly.” (…) Life will never be the same again. He thinks that he evokes a kind of painful nostalgia. The graduate of Concordia University, who shares her time between Kiev and Montreal, was then in Ukraine to prepare another documentary project and support as a fixer of foreign media that came to cover so much detained conflict. Like many, they believed that the threats marked by Vladimir Putin were just another maneuver that scared the Ukrainians and the West.
His “denial” brutally ends in the morning of February 24, when Russian artillery bombing the city of Kamatorsk in the Donetsk region, where Oksana Karpovych is next to journalists. In an emergency, the team will set out on a journey to the center of Ukraine in the hope that it will escape the bomb attacks, which is a route below the escape that will take almost 24 hours.
On this path, according to the windows of the car, the filmmaker collects his first paintings of the war: in the middle of the rural landscape, which she often traveled, a strong column of black smoke rises in the sky, a sign of a recent Russian strike. “I have seen things I have never seen in 24 hours in 24 hours,” he says. In the first minutes or hours of invasion, violence changes and transforms the landscape. It’s not the same anymore. Becomes hostile. (…) It was no longer a landscape I knew. »»
The desire to transpare on a film that remains with this devastation is slowly appearing. This idea materializes in the coming weeks, when Oksana Karpovych discovers the calls of Russian soldiers captured by Kiev and then transmits a telegram or on YouTube. “In this material, it is really brilliant and important that it opens a window for Russian society, its mentality and its propaganda,” summarizes the filmmaker, fascinating to enter the intimacy of the attacker.
Then she starts with Oksana and her small team to travel through Ukraine, large cities bombarded in villages devastated by Russia and passing those who were captivated by Ukrainian forces. The camera, in long -term fixed aircraft, films torn buildings, bombed cities or rural war areas, in the middle where Ukrainians lead their daily lives as they can.
“You kill fascists”
The aggressiveness of words – and horrors difficult to hear from certain crimes – contrasts with the slowness of plans and the beauty of certain scenes of the wasteland. This results in a process that is effective and worrying. “What do we do? We kill civilian children, ”admits the soldier of his husband. “No, you won’t kill children,” she replied. You kill fascists. “They were crying, begging me, I still shot,” the soldier said, admitted that he had not felt “nothing” in killing. For their mothers, their companions or sisters, the soldiers describe the Ukrainians who kill, torture or imprison, the villages that plundered, or again, the climate of the terror they embody in the population.
Many complain that they are in a war that neither end nor Raison d’être. “Anyway, we really don’t know what we went there, didn’t we?” It is a war “for the cause”, dropping a soldier. “But for what reason? The cause of whom? “He asks almost to the other end of the line.
In many cases, the words of relatives and joints exceed the violence of soldiers. “Are you sure they are people?” The woman offers a “joke” to “skewers” “skewers” “khokhols” – insults to identify Ukrainians -; Another “logical” judge that a woman was shot in front of her children, on the basis of an excuse that “it is an enemy”. Then we will capture the great dehumanization of the Ukrainian people, but also the stripping gap between the reality on the front of the Russian soldiers and the propaganda lies mediated by the Kremlin, which their loved ones prevents with conviction.
“What surprised me and what surprised that every spectator is that Russian families are involved in the cruelest way in what is happening,” admits Oksana Karpovych. At the end of this project, Montreal filmmaker admits that she was noted mainly by lack of soldiers’ responsibility and generalized violence of Russian society. “They were full of doubt or regret for taking part in this war, but in fact they never regret that they were attackers,” he sums up. Shocking was heard that they were very human. They do not want to die, they do not want to be injured. Their children are missing. Their mothers are missing. But as imperialists, they don’t care about Ukrainians. »»
Film Captured 31. January in Quebec in Quebec.
Leave a Reply