DAE Talks With: Director & Writer, Oleksiy Radynski and Producer, Lyuba Knorozok of SPECIAL OPERATION

Like every other year since its inception, the program selection at this year’s edition of DokuFest in Kosovo, its twenty-fourth, provided outstanding short and feature film works to view from all over the world. The theme this year was Endless Greed Mental Void, and indeed, much of the work reflected back to us our increasingly troubled world and the growing (and truly massive) amounts of documentation being filmed and uploaded, without any context much of the time. 

Kyiv-based filmmakers Oleksiy Radynski and Lyuba Knorozok were there with their latest piece called Special Operation (2025). Appearing as part of the International Feature Dox selection, the haunting 64-minute collage consists of CCTV footage recorded and archived by workers taken hostage at Ukraine’s Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant during the very beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion and occupation at the beginning of 2022. Chornobyl is the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history. 

The film had its début at Berlinale Forum Expanded 2025 and consists of recordings of the criminal activities taking place in the course of the five weeks the plant workers were held hostage at the radioactive site. Each shot of this film is also a piece of evidence representing a war crime of nuclear terror, the other horrendous crimes against civilians taking place off-screen in the vicinity of the capital, 130 kilometers to the south. The plant is situated near the abandoned city of Pripyat, south of the Belarus border.

Oleksiy has made groundbreaking film work that encounters various documentary forms and practices of political cinema, screened at film festivals and in art contexts worldwide since 2013, beginning with Incident in the Museum. Works that followed are Integration (2014), People Who Came to Power (with Tomas Rafa) (2015), Landslide (2016), The Film of Kyiv. Episode One (2017), Facade Color: Blue (2019), Сirculation (2020), Infinity According to Florian (2022), and the precursor to Special Operation, Chornobyl 22 in 2023, which won the Grand Prix at Oberhausen International Short Film Festival that year.

In 2024, Oleksiy and Lyuba made a film called Where Russia Ends, which tells the story from the late 1980s when a team of Ukrainian filmmakers undertook several film expeditions to remote areas of Siberia. Based on footage from the archives of the Kyiv Studio of Popular Science Film, the footage was created shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union with the reels being rediscovered in Kyiv in 2022 during the Russian invasion. This beautifully realized archive is a starting point for a film essay, that interrogates Russian imperialism, resource extraction, environmental destruction and the ongoing oppression and erasure of Indigenous peoples in Russia’s colonies, from the time of the Tsars through the Soviet era and the present day. 

I caught up with Oleksiy and Lybua via Zoom shortly after their return from Kosovo to Kyiv to talk more about their filmmaking practice and their contributions to the growing contemporary canon of both professional and citizen documentation in Ukraine. We also talk about what’s still waiting for discovery in the abandoned archives at one of the ex-Soviet film studios in Kyiv.

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Pamela Cohn (PC): I always like to start with a bit of background. Is it true that you were raised in the ruins of a film studio in Kyiv, Oleksiy? 

Oleksiy Radynski (OR): Yes, I grew up quite literally in the ruins of the Documentary Film Studio. I’m not the first generation in my family that works in film. My grandparents and my father all worked there, a kind of industrial factory for producing films that had its own kind of territory, its own kind of pavilions and its own kind of housing for the workers. By the time I was a kid, the studio was an actual ruin. After 1991, it fell into complete disrepair, abandoned for years. It was my playground, this environment. I was also fascinated with film since I was a kid, most likely because my family worked in film and I was exposed quite early in my life to the avant-garde, the type of film that became available quite widely at the same time. During the Soviet years, it wasn’t so widely available. My upbringing also coincided with the explosion of piracy and VHS and the availability of avant-garde cinema history. Even the mainstream TV channels played these films because they didn’t know what to screen. This cinephile experience I had when I was a kid influenced me a lot.

Lyuba Knorozok (LK): I grew up in a family of musicians so that was part of the art world, but I wasn’t really much into cinema. But the lack of that may have led me into what I’m doing now. Here in the 90s, cinema stopped working. The only exposure were random films played on TV and oftentimes, they were really great films. I come from a background of cultural theory and studied that for my degree along with Oleksiy. I ended up working with visual material. In the course of my studies, I also was more into reading all the time. I wasn’t a great writer, but I was writing about visual things and figured out that I was missing quality information, quality films, quality documentaries, especially documentaries. I saw a need to tell stories in a visual form.

I’ve never planned to be a filmmaker. We don’t have that training really, which I think is good because we have ideas on what we do want to share and talk about, not necessarily around how it looks. The core desire is to share ideas, important information rather than be concerned about decorative filmmaking.

PC: In line with that imperative, I’d like to ask your views on the contribution and meaning of all the citizen documentation that has been recorded in the span of time before the full-scale invasion and the ongoing realities of what’s happening in Ukraine up until the present day – this living, breathing, growing archive of film and video and sound recordings from all walks of society, including that of professional filmmakers, some of whom have become enlisted soldiers in the war. How does this enable you to keep experimenting with documentary forms and the way you approach making moving image work with various producing partners? 

LK: Regarding the amount of information and recordings, this is not something unique to Ukraine because the amount of visual information and the ability to record and to film, it’s happening everywhere in the world, especially starting since the 2000s and 2010s. On the one hand, this could make the process of the creation of documentary films easier, but on the other, it can make it much harder to find structure or to stop yourself from pursuing this kind of shock, fast-food content creation. Unfortunately, we see this a lot and it’s happening everywhere.

When we’re talking about war and huge life-changing events, the hardest part is not to document or to archive it necessarily, but first to process this information, to talk about these events about which we do not have any historical distance. How to find ways to transfer this information to audiences outside Ukraine is complicated. I work with different directors, each with different approaches of storytelling.

PC: In your work, there’s a really defined distillation of the material you choose to use, a purposeful dramaturgy, versus a sprawling survey of footage that could go on for hours. It must be so hard to discern what is meaningful after a while and I think that is mainly what sets apart artists and filmmakers using this content in a way a non-professional would not. Can you share a bit of your thinking process before you begin piecing a film together?

OR: As Lyuba said, we’re not really trained as documentary filmmakers. I studied film theory. It does start with ideas about films I want to make, but really, I never know when the filmmaking actually begins. In other words, I never know if it is going to be a film. I’m digging in a certain direction and have assumptions about certain things that could be assembled or excavated and that there is a chance there is a film inside of this field I’m looking at. With almost each of my documentaries, certain things start to happen in real life, and I follow them without a preconceived idea of a film. Oftentimes, there is an idea that it will be a certain kind of film, but it’s never that kind of film in the end.

PC: Can you talk a bit about your work with The Reckoning Project?

OR: I was invited by Lyuba and Nataliya [Gumenyuk], the co-founders of the project, a project meant to document Russian war crimes in Ukraine, and of course I was happy to join. I wanted to look at what the Russians did at Chornobyl. In fact, we were planning to work there before the invasion, so that landscape was not entirely new. When the Chornobyl zone was de-occupied, liberated from the Russian army, I started to record in-depth interviews with the survivors of the occupation. But because of this filmmaking instinct, we filmed these interviews properly. Until we did half a dozen of these, I didn’t think these were going to be in a film because I’d never used interviews in my films before. As we spoke to more people, this puzzle started to come together, hearing all this testimony, sharing what they saw, what the Russians were doing. We started to go to the Chornobyl zone and found that one of our witnesses had been brave enough to film on his mobile phone every time a Russian convoy came through, enormous amounts of hours of his footage. This is when it occurred to me that yes, there’s probably a film inside this material. That’s when the previously recorded testimonies started to make more sense in context. They had been recorded as part of The Reckoning Project basically for the sake of having witness testimonies for the court. But they could also possibly be used for a film.

LK: The Reckoning Project was created as a combination of a media project and a collection of testimonies. Witnesses or victims of war crimes are eager to talk and share their stories with journalists or activists or documentarians without any prosecutor or police present. We wanted to use the opportunity so that these testimonies would be applicable to the court proceedings and legal cases. We trained with legal analysts and lawyers, so it wasn’t the kind of interview journalists normally do. It could be up to two or three hours of answering lots of questions, very in-depth. But from the very beginning, if the person agreed, we decided to record it for other future uses, maybe for a film or a museum exhibit or a theatre piece. We wanted to preserve as much archive as possible. Nowadays, that’s maybe more of a normal practice. Just during the first six months of the full-scale invasion, five people we had interviewed had died. But their testimonies and summaries exist and can be used, both the audio and the video. We wanted to preserve as much as possible from the very beginning, the most important thing being that we don’t want to re-traumatize or traumatize them twice, so doing it in the proper way once is our main goal and we wanted to share this information if people agreed to that – orally, visually, and in writing.

What Oleksiy does is author or artistic documentaries and that’s one thing. But we also created stories for different platforms and films that dedicate themselves to talking about other war crimes in every region of Ukraine to a broader public, not only the numbers or statistics to provide to the outside world but stories presented where people could actually reflect and understand and have a more human connection to it all. We want to record, keep the memories of what happened, to create an archive, to talk about it as a continuation of the larger events happening here up until the present. We’ve created two films specifically about the nuclear terrorism topic with Oleksiy but there could be many more films about this, unfortunately. Special Operation is the story of the occupation of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant in the first month of the full-scale invasion but the biggest working nuclear power plant in Ukraine is still occupied by Russian forces. The Russian Atomic Agency is still present, and they continue to build nuclear power plants worldwide even though they are now war criminals. They’re hiding behind this agency and so it was really important for us, and continues to be, to share this information.

PC: You’ve continued to make work with the same small group of collaborators – Taras Spivak, your editor and sound recordist Andriy Borysenko, and you working together as a director/producer team. The edit in Special Operation is mesmerizing, creating a series of hypnotic vignettes that feel somehow like we are watching what amount to these soldiers enacting strange choreographies, surreal and sometimes quite funny levels of (self) documentation and coverage, with invited “press” along, whilst covering up some of the cameras they find. But they don’t find them all. Oleksiy, you’ve written about the fact that it’s “not just about the grim military idiocy, but that it also tells the story of a tremendous military defeat of the Russian army which will hopefully soon be repeated on a larger scale”. 

OR: I am lucky and really blessed to work with the people I do. I’ve made all my films with Lyuba and the last three films with Taras, who is also a documentary filmmaker. He’s doing extremely interesting work with found footage and re-imaging the archival material, which is an interest we share. We were in the same cultural studies department, so he didn’t study film as a maker but as a scholar, like we did. I almost always begin by working with the footage myself into some rough-cut stage. Before working with Taras, I also worked with the great Mykola Bazarkin for many years – we all worked along the same model of knowing the footage intimately and being able to discuss it together. I can’t imagine doing it any other way that I do in making the first assembly myself. But after that we get together, in this case with Taras, who tells me what’s wrong with my rough cut. And most of it is wrong, of course. We start to do editing exercises, mostly using paper cuts. 

In the case of this film, we worked the same way, but the character of the footage was key. We had a bit less than 1000 hours recorded by the CCTV cameras, and while this sounds like a lot, this is a normal way to start editing a documentary where you have much more footage than what will end up in the film. In much of this footage, there was barely anything going on, often the case with this dumb reality of war when it’s far from the frontlines. It’s occupied territory but there’s almost no fighting or it’s happening off-screen. There wasn’t any in the nuclear plant and this is, of course, why we are all still alive, right? 

I thought that this probably could be a war film with barely any action in the frame. That felt interesting to me, to talk about war this way since we rarely get this sort of an image, far from the frontlines in a zone that’s occupied under an extremely dangerous situation, an armed takeover of a de-commissioned nuclear plant. You can see almost none of this in the footage but what you can see are Russian soldiers standing around doing nothing. Their mere presence, the fact of them standing there doing nothing is a war crime. It’s an illegal occupation of a nuclear facility.

The footage can sometimes feel too mild because then you compare this to what the soldiers are doing when they take over villages, towns and cities – pillage, rape, mass murder. We don’t see this in the frame. They didn’t kill anyone in the nuclear power plant but what they did do was kidnap the personnel at the plant for a period of time, holding them in captivity, human trafficking, in other words.

PC: I think this is the key thing that gives the film its deeply disturbing quality. And it also left so many questions for me as a non-Ukrainian watching this. Understanding the broad strokes of what you’re up to in this film, but also mis-interpreting a lot of what I’m seeing.

In the beginning of Special Operation, you have a card that says it could be a trigger warning for some to see the Russian soldiers. But – and this is the most disturbing take-away for me – the way in which the dramaturgy is built in this film, as well as in Chornobyl 22, is that there’s an almost distanced empathy created for these ground soldiers. You illustrate that the Russian military elite, even from the beginning, have so little regard for their own soldiers, telling them that Chornobyl was as safe as “a resort”, a place where they come for R&R before returning to the capitol to shoot and bomb and kill. Can you talk a bit about these various human costs on the other side and how those things sit in this universe you’re creating?

OR: So, yes, this is a film about Russian soldiers and the Russian army and how fucked up it is. In some audiences there have been both former and current members of the military from various armies that have told me that I did capture this extreme organizational disfunction – they recognize it. This makes it much more dangerous, especially when they’re taking over a place like Chornobyl. We rarely see long uninterrupted shots of Russian soldiers in the midst of this dysfunctional army machine, how the traditional structure is organized. In seeing this footage, that was important to expose this dysfunctionality up to the point of it being ridiculous, feeling like a dark comedy to some spectators.

It’s also a film about the gaze directed at this army. Some things I can control or program and some things I cannot. One of those elements is empathy viewers – mostly Westerners, I’ve noticed – might have for these people. I certainly don’t have any empathy for these soldiers. For me, I don’t care whether they are there not of their free will or forced somehow to fight an aggressive war against another country. Even in that situation, you can express your free will by deserting. Or by surrendering, or by committing suicide. If you’re part of a war of aggression and not deserting, you don’t deserve any empathy. 

This gets back to the question of the workers at the nuclear plant who were captured by the Russians, forced to stay at their workplaces twenty-four hours a day for five weeks. Some of their jobs have to do with reviewing footage from the security cameras, which they were also secretly backing up, risking their lives. In a way, they claim some sort of power over the perpetrators, those who captured them by filming them. They started to look more closely and started to even have some fun doing this, I think, filming all the ludicrous stuff going on. This is basically a film about this kind of counter-power of their gaze. It’s a surveillance camera used by a human operator who is a captive, part of this human trafficking perpetrated by the Russians.

LK: To add something about this idea of empathy: Maybe there could be some at the beginning. But we’d done these recordings of the testimonies and started to go through this material to make the film, and so then we knew very well that some of the units who appear in the frame, particularly those who were obviously ordered to go there, maybe or maybe not against their will, were one of the units who committed mass killings of the civilian population in the Kyiv region. So, while we’re seemingly watching nothing happening onscreen in Chornobyl where they are resting, smoking, hanging out, showering, etc., what is offscreen is the continual committing of mass killing every day, outside that frame. We wanted to create this suspense so that the knowledge of what was happening made empathy for them totally impossible.

To add also onto what Oleksiy said about the first shift of the workers under the occupation, this night shift who was there to meet the invaders were held in captivity: This was also their choice. They are highly trained engineers, physicians and all the other highly skilled workers at the plant stayed because of the danger of leaving it totally in the hands of the captors. 

PC: Do they live close by the plant, in the area?

LK: No, they live outside the Chornobyl Zone. Where were they going to go if they chose to leave? To the middle of the radioactive forest? What I’m trying to say is that these people are so committed, so dedicated to their work, the operation and running of this de-commissioned nuclear power plant. It cannot just exist. You can’t just switch things off and go home.

OR: They were told by the Russians that they could go, but if they went, they would die.

LK: There is no way to go. At the same time, if there would have been a place they could go, I doubt these people would leave anyway. It’s a unique team at a unique place so it’s not just a random job, backing up this material and filming the blackmail happening.

PC: You spend a long time on what I’ll call the “bread truck” scene that occurs around the middle of Special Operation. And admittedly, I didn’t have a clear idea what was happening there. Were they stealing bread that was supposed to go to the workers? Taking it for themselves?

OR: No, this was a staged situation for propaganda purposes. They were the ones who brought the trucks filled with bread, inviting “press” to film and record it. It was such an absurd thing to do because that’s not needed there. They film the distribution of “humanitarian aid” to the workers but of course the workers refuse to participate in this charade, so the soldiers distribute the bread amongst themselves.

LK: The power plant has stores of enough food supplies to survive for a half a year. According to anti-radiation safety rules, food coming from outside is not allowed. To bring these truckloads of bread, which became poisoned upon hitting the air there, is also absurd.

PC: It’s interesting to me this sort of dichotomy of your mission to document and make things very clear to people about what’s happening there, while also creating some less clear scenes where disorientation or misunderstanding can happen on the part of a viewer. 

LK: You must have questions in the end. That’s what we want. Our audience has got to be confused because there is a lot of confusion in the reality we’re dealing with.

OR: This is a film about an experience of the occupation. It’s not a film about the nuclear power plant, really. You don’t get the whole story or a logical sequence of events but a reproduction of the experience of people held in captivity and here we can experience this through their eyes. They were able to film part of that experience. As Lyuba said, the viewer has got to be confused, otherwise it wouldn’t feel true, this experience of captivity; being held like that means a lot of confusion. You don’t get what’s going on.

PC: Going back to the beginning of this conversation, and the floods of content we all have available at our disposal to look at, to listen to, much of it being used for nefarious purposes by who knows, people in power to manipulate masses of people, etc. You’re using this CCTV footage in part for war crime testimony, eye-witness testimony, making the film fall into a truly liminal space and I can think of lots of films that refuse to go there for fear of the kinds of confusion or misinterpretation we’re talking about. You’re willing to cede some narrative control and many makers do not do that. I guess what I’m trying to say is that after this conversation, I admire the film even more than I already did.

OR: I appreciate that. But I can also say that we’re not fooling ourselves into thinking this is a film for a mass audience. It’s screened in places like Berlinale Forum Expanded or DokuFest, exhibition spaces that don’t really have this very large-scale impact on mass media and public opinion, even though I think it’s important to have this niche covered, this more experimental approach to representing war. And not just for the sake of the experiment: this war has produced a huge amount of new mediatic experiences that have to be reflected upon. This is the footage we got our hands on so it would be unfair to do something else because it’s a film that responds to this footage we received. This is a privilege so I don’t think I would be too eager to use this privilege if we hadn’t made Chornobyl 22, a straightforward, formally direct, clear film before this one, about the same events. In that film, everyone is identified; the sequence of events is presented in a logical way. In a way, Special Operation is almost a footnote to the short film. Some of the people who are in that film might be some of the same people that filmed the footage used in Special Operation, although nothing was really said about that because they cannot admit this. 

Chornobyl is a very difficult place to move away from. In other words, once you start doing things in the zone, it doesn’t let you stop so we’ve continued to collect footage. I can say also that that zone can be a trap because there are people who started to make a film in the zone and never stopped. I’m not sure we’re ready to enter this trap, but there’s also no way not to make films about the Russian invasion and that’s going to be the case for a long time. It’s a question of new approaches in the ways of representing it.

LK: The work will never really be made into straightforward stories about the war. One of our main interests is to continue to work with the archives since we are a collective. So, it’s not just for our own film works, but to work together to get things digitized and preserve the abandoned archives at Kyivnaukfilm, one of the ex-Soviet film studios in Kyiv. We’ve worked a lot in the archives. This archive that’s used for Special Operation is the contemporary archive, but we still can look at it from some distance. For our previous and future works, we will continue to work with different kinds of archive materials, to find the position of our research while being deep inside the situation here. This is exactly what the archive gives to us personally, this kind of perspective.

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