When they ask me
what war is
I’ll answer without hesitation:
it’s names.
— from “A thread of sky”, Poems from the Loophole by Maksym ‘Dali’ Kryvtsov, Ukrainian poet and soldier, killed on a battlefield at the age of 33 on 7 January 2024.
There is a growing body of nonfiction feature-length cinematic works out of Ukraine around the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. The war began a decade ago in February 2014, the year of Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity when Russian forces occupied and annexed Crimea from Ukraine, whilst also supporting pro-Russian separatists fighting the Ukrainian military in the Donbas region. Land, sea, air, and cyberwarfare attacks ensued. On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine once again with a full-scale country-wide invasion, attempting to decimate everything in its wake. In large part, it’s succeeded.
As director Olha Zhurba and producer Darya Bassel explain in the following conversation, their task as film professionals is to document incidences of what’s happening there, things that are changing or affecting the society as a whole. Songs of Slow Burning Earth is the second feature by Olha with Darya producing. Darya’s company, Moon Man Production was founded with Vika Khomenko in 2019 – both producers had multidisciplinary professional backgrounds that encompassed film production, cultural management, and festival distribution. Later, producer Sasha Kravchenko also joined the company which focuses on creative documentary and fiction films with a strong authorial approach. Its first title was Olha’s feature documentary début, Outside (2022). Moon Man has also co-produced the award-winning, Oscar-nominated documentary, Simon Lereng Wilmont’s, A House Made of Splinters (2022) and Oksana Karpovych’s highly acclaimed Intercepted (2024). This year, Moon Man premiered the political satire The Editorial Office directed by Roman Bondarchuk at the Berlinale and is in the midst of developing several fiction and documentary titles by Ukrainian filmmakers, Iryna Tsilyk, Kateryna Gornostai, Roman Bondarchuk, and Vadym Ilkov.
Olha is a film director, editor, and screenwriter. Her short fiction film Dad’s Sneakers premiered at Locarno and went on to garner much critical acclaim and awards. Outside, premiered at CPH:DOX in Europe and Hot Docs in North America and won the Willy Brandt award at the Human Rights Film Festival Berlin, as well as the Japan Prize Award of Honor. Olha is the editor of the award-winning documentary films, Home Games (2018) and This Rain Will Never Stop (2020).
The production of Songs of Slow Burning Earth has realized robust international support by the following: Danish Film Institute; IDFA Bertha Fund Classic; IDFA Bertha Fund Europe; Swedish Film Institute; Chicken & Egg Pictures; InMaat; The European Solidarity Fund for Ukrainian Films; The Prague Civil Society Center; SVT; International MEDIA Support; DR; The Documenting Ukraine grant program by IWM; The Republic of Austria’s Federal Ministry of Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport; The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights WATCH DOCS Fund; The French Ministry for Europe & Foreign Affairs; The Goethe Institut; and, Women Make Movies. The film is the recipient of The Ukrainian Film Academy’s Post-Production Grant Program in partnership with Netflix and is part of The Generation Ukraine collection developed and supported by ARTE. Songs of Slow Burning Earth is also co-produced by ARTE France, and Film i Skane.
Shortly before its world premiere, Michaela Čajka of Prague-based Filmotor came on board as the film’s international sales agent.
Before the film’s first festival exhibition at the 81st edition of La Biennale di Venezia (28 August – 7 September), I spoke with Olha and Darya about the making of this audiovisual diary of a country’s immersion into the hellscape of the latest war in their home country. The film chronologically documents how even the most brutal of wars engenders a kind of normalization on the part of the citizenry being attacked daily for years on end. It is devastating and heartbreaking, to be sure. But it’s also a portrait of an incredibly brave and resilient populace, aspiring to not only survive intact, but to imagine a hopeful future on behalf of its youngest generations. If only the rest of the world keeps listening, continues to pay attention to what can only extrapolate into every other conflict happening on our planet right now – for the film hopes to be, according to its makers, a cautionary tale of what can happen when any nation, large or small, is long held in the grip of a powerful dictatorship with persistent war and destruction its superseding goal.
Pamela Cohn (PC): There is a growing archive of nonfiction feature-length films about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and what’s happening in the moment. There are essay films, more journalistic pieces, cinematic works. What was your initial narrative vision for this film, Olha?
Olha Zhurba (OZ): There wasn’t really any concrete concept in the beginning. We just started shooting and it wasn’t really in terms of making a film. Our thought was to collect footage that would be archival. Danger was in the air, the apocalyptic feeling of that reality was there, and the goal was to capture these moments. In the first two months of the war, Russian troops were coming – from the east, from the north, from the south of Ukraine. Would we be occupied? Would we survive? The first weeks when we were traveling from the railway station and shooting in different places, our main concern was how to keep the material safe.
From the beginning, it was obvious to me that all the shots should be stable since I was thinking about it as archival footage rather than scenes from a film. We made long takes with the camera mounted on a tripod so that historians and people looking at it in the future could see more details. This decision carried on once we decided to start thinking about this material as scenes in a film. Then the work of writing synopses and treatments of what we were wanting to make began. That’s when I really started to consider what the film would be about.
However, we were documenting the reality of what was happening, and that reality, of course, was very unpredictable. Each day could change whatever story I wanted to tell because, for me, it was about the collective, how Ukrainian society was changing collectively. After one full year of the war, we had adapted to all the chaos, but the apocalyptic reality is still present. What was different was our collective adjustment and adaptation to that chaos. It was then that it was easier for me to plan and to think and finalize what the film would be about and what material I wanted to capture to complete it. But the plot, if you want to call it that, was dependent on the reality happening around us, as well as my own reality from what I was seeing in the society around me. To capture things observationally was important, but it was also important to capture things happening in my own daily life. By making a film, it helped me to have a bit of distance. I could see these changes more clearly with that distance.
Darya was helping so many filmmakers who also started filming from the beginning of the war. Like me, others started out the same way, not so much thinking about making films, but documentation. We all had the same feeling about survival, who would survive, what would survive. Darya wasn’t working so much as a producer, but as a human being trying to help anyone that she could with gathering equipment, making contacts, figuring out access to oil and gas for the cars. She was managing several groups like this. In the early days of the occupation, particularly in the north, in the Kyiv region in late March and early April of 2022, all was still so uncertain and unstable. But everyone was trying to do something, enlisting, helping in various ways, everyone was very active and even though it was chaotic, it was a united effort on behalf of all the people of Ukraine for that period of time. So, the beginning of this was in that process of help and aid.
PC: What was so vital to you personally, Darya, to make sure a filmic archive of the war would be in place? It’s mentioned in the synopsis of this film that the invasion and what’s happening in Ukraine on a daily basis now is viewed as an afterthought for the rest of the world. Perhaps this speaks more to the dizzying rapidity of how we are forced to cycle through what passes for “breaking news”?
Darya Bassel (DB): For me, when the full-scale invasion began it was just about mental survival, to continue daily life, doing the same things I was doing before. I did not go to the frontline; I did not change my profession; I didn’t take a camera and go to dangerous places to film. I moved from Kyiv to the western part of the country and stayed in the “back office”, meaning my apartment, working on the computer. [laughing] I was doing the same job, but the aims were different. It was how I kept sane, to stick to the things that were part of my reality before. That helped me to survive psychologically.
It’s interesting that you mention this idea about an afterthought on the part of the rest of the world. I guess it speaks to the difference between how we feel about ourselves and how the rest of the world feels about Ukraine and Ukrainians. It’s a personal feeling and something I also hear from friends and other filmmakers I’m working with that the world didn’t forget about us exactly, but that its importance and the urgency of the situation is not really in the top news items anymore. For instance, just recently there was an attack on a children’s cancer hospital in Kyiv and there was no reaction even though it was a huge, very painful event. But there was almost no news about it. Sometimes when we see things like that, we realize that even though we are still in this horrible situation of war, for the rest of the world it’s not so urgent anymore.
OZ: I absolutely understand why most of the rest of the world could disagree with this idea of Ukraine being an afterthought. One of the main proposals of this film is to make everyone not in Ukraine who will watch it feel the war more closely, more personally. Many don’t know that already in the occupied territories from 2022, Russian authorities have been creating a youth army. This is already everywhere all over Russia and now they’re doing the same here in occupied territories that belong to Ukraine – making future soldiers. The more territory they occupy, the closer to the West they will be. The danger for us is closer than it is for you, however, this is not only our war. The world needs to wake up to this. I know it’s hard to think about some day in the future when this war will spill over into other countries and regions, but it’s becoming closer to that reality. This is not to cause fear in people but from centuries of living next to Russia, we know who they are. We can find out about and read about pro-Russia propaganda that allows us to have a deeper understanding of what’s really going on and we want to warn the world. It’s not that we haven’t received help or feel that nobody cares about this conflict. It’s more about the rest of the world not waking up in time to realize how much this will have an impact on many other places besides Ukraine.
PC: Let’s talk about the involvement of the three extraordinary cinematographers who shot the film: Volodymyr Usyk, Viacheslav Tsvietkov, and Misha Lubarsky. Why three camera people? How did you work with them and how did you coordinate the different locations in which you shot throughout Ukraine?
OZ: The answer as to why we used three different camera people is really not that interesting. [laughs] All three of them are some of the most talented cinematographers in Ukraine. They’re all highly professional and have a strong aesthetic. We started out with Viacheslav Tsvietkov, but then he wanted to be with his community of filmmakers so he couldn’t continue with me. Volodymyr and I worked together on my first feature film, and we know one another very well. He was abroad when the war started so couldn’t be there from the beginning. We shot a lot when he came back to the country but as he’s one of the best cinematographers here, he had and continues to have, many other projects that overlapped with ours. And so then came the third really talented camera person, Misha Lubarsky, who’s very sensitive. Ninety-five percent of the time I’m working with them, I’m standing very close by. It’s not a trust thing but more about preserving the language of the film I had in mind. We were editing while shooting so I had the image of the entire film in my head so I could help direct them.
Shooting in a place like the bread factory or the funeral in the mountains or in the deliberated territories: these were all episodes that were very carefully prepared in advance. These are scenes that happen daily, there’s a consistency to them. Then we figured out a creative way to tell and capture the processes that happen in those places pretty much every day. There was some location scouting. When we shot material, I could immediately think about what was happening in a scene and know how to capture those moments so we could edit it in the language of the film. To discover a strong episode of telling the story of children and families living in occupied territory, there was time spent researching and talking to various people, getting to know them a bit, to see what their daily life is like. Then I could write about possible scenes that we could capture and shots that are part of this image of the film I already had in mind. Of course, during filming there are unpredictable moments but because we’d spent time, we were also somehow prepared for something unplanned. There was a visual concept discussed with the cinematographers and they could already recognize and know how to film these unpredictable moments within that concept. We were very lucky all three of them could join the project because they each brought a lot to the film.
PC: There are many affecting scenes in the film, but what struck me the most throughout the entire film, even from the very beginning, was the communal way in which a whole society works together and supports one another in their loss, pain and struggles for equilibrium in the midst of such chaos. For me, it’s one of the most deeply moving portrayals of a collective under intense duress.
OZ: Hopefully, the viewer, has been becoming more and more a part of these processes and as I stated before, my goal was to make a viewer feel very close to the way we are feeling about any given circumstance or ritual, the pain the society, as a whole, is going through. There were many facets to the decisions in those sequences, which are meant to be immersive, maybe a place where viewers will hold their breath. I wanted a visceral feeling around certain social rituals because I’ve participated in them as most people have here, not only as a filmmaker, but as a human being. Regular citizens are defending us from death, from occupation. Everyone shows them the respect they are due.
PC: As a producer extremely adept at putting together international co-productions, Darya, there is a sense that you sit in the middle of a lot of what’s going on cinematically in the country. What are your thoughts on the aspects of your role in all the productions you handle?
DB: I don’t think of myself as being at the epicenter of anything. [laughs] The Ukrainian documentary scene is not huge, but it’s very powerful. There are great producers and production companies here working on very cool films that will be released in the coming years, films with important messages but films that are also works of art. The types of films we, in this bubble, are interested in are not really focused on information. We are interested in creative documentaries that speak through human emotions. This was so before the full-scale invasion and it is so right now and, god help us, it’s going to be so in the future. It’s just the way we work. The directors with whom I’m lucky to work cannot create other films in any other way because they are creative and artistic, and they speak to the world, and to themselves, through their impressions of their own reality.
I don’t believe in making a fast impact with these films. Maybe in fifty years there will be another war, but with the experience of watching these films about this one, audiences will remember those emotions because they were deeply changed by those experiences. There’s no way to predict what the actual result of a film will be. It’s complicated to measure. We have to try to create the possibility of as many people as possible being able to watch this film, and other films about this war. Let them feel. Let them think. I think it’s important for people to raise as many questions as possible, to think as much as possible, because the informational war is also going on parallel to the physical war.
PC: I can’t think of too many instances where this widespread collectivity in pushing a specific artistic agenda exists like it does in Ukraine. Has this always been a reflection of the documentary landscape in the country, or has the invasion rendered this a special circumstance where so much is shared between projects? How does this ultimately effect audiences in terms of what’s happening now, what could happen, what might happen? Our world feels like it’s at a very vital tipping point towards an international fascism take-over. Formerly indomitable nations are undermined by their own leadership. And formerly powerless nations are speaking truth to power no matter the consequences. How do you see the nonfiction feature form continue to deeply impact people in this way?
DB: We can say there is a boom of documentary films in Ukraine right now. Obviously, the events are extraordinary so it’s natural that many people are documenting them and making films. I also think documentary films can connect to an audience better than fiction films can, emotionally. Every film is born from a person’s thoughts. It’s not CCTV camera footage, right? But it’s still reality – real stories, real people. I think every documentary filmmaker from Ukraine is also working in the realm of cultural diplomacy. Their films are a tool for cultural diplomacy because there’s an immediate connection with people depicted in films. At the time that I’m sitting here in this room speaking to you, somebody is dying; somebody is burying a husband. It can’t help but touch you as a viewer. And then you can be ready to take an action.
OZ: It’s also a big responsibility to make documentaries about war. These have an impact on the image of Ukraine and the situation here. For me, I know that many artists and filmmakers are now also fighting in this war, and I have the privilege to make films. Right now, films and artmaking are a bigger privilege than ever. Other artists have already died and some feel, even though they’d like to continue to make films, that they have to go and fight right now. The responsibility of that privilege seems even stronger now than it was before. What are you making? What’s it about? It can’t just be a simple, beautiful thing. It should have impact, otherwise why are we doing it? Of course, we want to live in another space where we can make films on other things, comedies, fantasies, etc. But I think with a longer perspective, war effects the issues and topics that we’re bringing up in our films, touching upon deeper reflections of what’s happening.
PC: The last part of Songs of Slow Burning Earth encompasses themes of the incredible resilience and a life-affirming sense of humor on the part of returning soldiers, who even though they’ve lost body parts and will have life-long PTSD are clearly happy to be able to return to their families. There’s also this focus on schoolchildren and high schoolers. On the one hand there’s talk about dreams – personal dreams, national dreams. But there are also certain things being embedded in them in the formative years of their education that have to do with future wars. Why was that important to include?
OZ: It was important because the Russian Federation, a country run by a dictator, is preparing for the long-term, preparing to have those future wars. This kind of leadership is more powerful than that of democratic countries and this is one example. We share a border with this dictatorship country. This message is not only for the Western world. That will always be coming from that side of the border. It’s not necessarily Putin’s war; he won’t live forever. But the machinery he’s put in place will ensure the continuation of waging war and it can’t stop immediately, even if things change. Something inside that country needs to change because this brain cleansing of the population is happening on a very large scale. It would take decades, maybe centuries even, to reverse that. We will have this neighbor country for the foreseeable future.
Even if the war were to end tomorrow, the danger is there, and it will exist as long as dictatorship policies in this big country continue to exist. The mindset and the brainwashing will also continue as it does now. My hope is that some people will read this as the warning message it is, but also, like some artistic pieces, it will bring forth questions and I will be there to try and answer those questions and explain about this militarization process that now colors our own occupied territories. It’s very scary because Ukrainian children in ten years will be fighting and occupying us from the Russian side. We are a weak country when it comes to comparing the forces between Russia and Ukraine – even with all the support in the world. For us, there will always be danger until I don’t know when. It’s an open question. We have some ideas of how this could end, but even the experts don’t have a definitive answer as to how and when.
DB: This was a huge question that Olya wanted to place at the end of the film, with people asking themselves what is next, what the future holds for these children and teenagers. In reading some articles and watching online videos recently about the teenage population in Ukrainian occupied territories right now in the southern parts of the country that have been occupied for two years and counting, we realize that they are being trained to be soldiers – Russian soldiers. You can easily imagine how they will come to the territories of Ukraine that are not yet occupied in a handful of years from now, how they will kill people who used to be their fellow citizens. It’s very scary how this brainwashing machine works, and these scenes are meant to start this conversation, to alert people.
OZ: The ending was crucial because I believe that such an ending can touch the soul of an international audience. Otherwise, it would feel too much like an insider film, something meant just for Ukraine. How could we share this experience in order to get people to come closer? Before the last two segments, we show this experience of war in what people go through. It could be the same experience in other places, with other faces. As I said before, we showed what happens in a routine way, there’s nothing that particular about them. It’s the adaptation to all that’s going on that was important to capture.
DB: I used to be a film programmer, so I know that side of the game also. Right now, what irritates me is the way the Ukrainian topic is being dealt with. It’s cruel, even when you know the game and when you yourself are part of the industry. It still feels a bit insane. How many films from Ukraine about the war can we have? Can the market handle ten films, twenty? To me, at times it feels funny insane and sometimes scary insane. How many films should there be about equality for women and women’s rights? As many as we need! As many as we want! I mean as long as there are going to be problems with attaining equal rights for women, we have to have those films.
So as long as the war is going on, as long as people are being tortured, raped, murdered, we have to talk about that, to try to understand why it’s happening and what we can do to stop it. We should not reduce the amounts of films about Ukraine or any other relevant world crisis topic. We might have to reconsider how we approach that, how the market approaches it. I understand all the challenges that sales agents, buyers, and the VOD platform players are going through right now. But it’s part of our responsibility to talk about this war. It concerns everyone. We are in the position right at this moment to talk about it, to show it. Programmers, sales agents and everyone involved in distribution should feel that it’s very important to create possibilities to show these films and to discuss them.
OZ: Yes, it’s part of our world. It’s not just what is happening in Ukraine. How can we stop filming the war here? Sorry, but that would be so surreal! It’s affected every part of our lives and even fiction films made now will, somehow, be about the war. Not as the central topic, necessarily, but we couldn’t just not deal with it. If the world wants to have Ukrainian films, they need to understand that all of them will be touched by the war because it’s our life now. It’s our reality.
Pamela Cohn is a Helsinki-based critic, writer, film & video curator, story structure consultant, and festival moderator.
She’s the author of Lucid Dreaming: Conversations with 29 Filmmakers(OR Books, New York & London, 2020), and co-producer and host of The Lucid Dreaming Podcast: Conversations on Cinema, Art & Moving Image.
