At Sheffield Doc/​Fest, film­mak­ers reflect on the war in Ukraine

On 24 Feb­ru­ary 2022, after years of esca­lat­ing aggres­sion, Rus­sia invad­ed Ukraine. This dec­la­ra­tion of full-scale war has had swift and dire con­se­quences: the destruc­tion of cities leav­ing a third of the country’s pop­u­la­tion dis­placed; crimes against human­i­ty that are under­go­ing inves­ti­ga­tion in inter­na­tion­al courts; and the largest refugee cri­sis with­in Europe since World War II. While one war is being fought on the ground, anoth­er is hap­pen­ing in the media and online. In Rus­sia, the inva­sion has been dimin­ished to a ​“spe­cial mil­i­tary oper­a­tion”, while those speak­ing out are being threat­ened with fines and prison sen­tences. Mean­while, in Ukraine, online state pro­pa­gan­da is push­ing nar­ra­tives of wartime mar­tyrs and nation­al heroes to boost morale.

The ques­tion of how to eth­i­cal­ly cap­ture a war that is still unfold­ing was one being asked at the 2022 edi­tion of Sheffield DocFest. A sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of this year’s pro­gramme was ded­i­cat­ed to Ukrain­ian film­mak­ers and artists who have been cap­tur­ing the country’s polit­i­cal, social and cul­tur­al land­scape on the ground for years. Films made pri­or to the 2022 inva­sion took on omi­nous sig­nif­i­cance, like Boney Piles, a jour­ney through war torn east­ern Ukraine. Fol­low­ing a group of boys near the Ukrain­ian-Russ­ian bor­der, a new gen­er­a­tion comes of age in Taras Tomenko’s doc­u­men­tary against des­o­late land­scapes. The dou­ble mean­ing of the film’s title – ​“boney piles” refers to both the region’s excess waste removed dur­ing min­ing, as well as the vic­tims of its con­flict – cou­ples with the non-intru­sive cam­er­a­work of cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er, Misha Lubarsky, and allows the emp­ty land­scape, and the young boys grow­ing up with­in it, to cre­ate their own mean­ing with­out exter­nal appraisal, for bet­ter or worse.

Screen­ing in the festival’s 2022 Inter­na­tion­al Com­pe­ti­tion was One Day in Ukraine, a recent feat in doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ing from the Ukrain­ian doc­u­men­tary col­lec­tive, Babylon’13. This group of film­mak­ers, who have been cap­tur­ing social unrest on the streets of Ukraine since the country’s 2013 protests that led to the oust­ing of the pro-Russ­ian pres­i­dent Vik­tor Yanukovych, com­plet­ed pro­duc­tion and post-pro­duc­tion in just three months, ready for the film to screen at this year’s DocFest.

Since the 2022 Russ­ian inva­sion, Babylon’13 has been shoot­ing short doc­u­men­taries from the front­line and dis­trib­ut­ing them either them­selves, across their social media chan­nels, or through inter­na­tion­al news chan­nels, as well as col­lab­o­rat­ing on this fea­ture. Cap­tured by twelve cin­e­matog­ra­phers and direct­ed by Volodymyr Tykhyy, One Day in Ukraine is the sto­ry of Kyiv on just one date: March 14, 2022. Descend­ing down a long esca­la­tor, the cam­era finds the city’s res­i­dents liv­ing in sub­way sta­tions, work­ing togeth­er to carve out a new nor­mal in the war. Cats and chil­dren lounge togeth­er, while elder­ly women scold the cameraman’s angles and night­time enter­tain­ment of car­toons and music sti­fle the noise of bombs.

Mean­while, above ground, the film takes us along to the front­lines, where we fol­low the military’s tac­ti­cal drone sur­veil­lance, and into the kitchens, where food is being pre­pared to feed a nation by women with blue and yel­low paint­ed nails. The domes­tic, the polit­i­cal and the per­son­al are spliced togeth­er by Babylon’13 in their deeply mov­ing doc­u­men­tary that glimpses life in con­tem­po­rary Kyiv through the eyes of a mod­el, a polar researcher, a his­to­ri­an, a par­lia­ment mem­ber and a film edi­tor, who now make up the country’s vol­un­tary war effort.

A pro­gramme of short films, apt­ly titled Over­com­ing the Dark­ness, offered a sim­i­lar­ly kalei­do­scop­ic depic­tion of life in con­tem­po­rary Ukraine. Pub­lished by a Ukrain­ian media chan­nel called Kino Dopo­mo­ha, which, like Babylon’13, dis­trib­utes short videos on YouTube, this pro­gramme of short doc­u­men­taries are filmed by a com­bi­na­tion of pro­fes­sion­al and ama­teur doc­u­men­tar­i­ans and offer per­spec­tives from across Ukraine. In Try­ing to Leave, hand-held footage shot by a man and his fam­i­ly in Kharkiv chron­i­cles their flight from the city, while City of Parks cap­tures the chaos of those who have been dis­placed by Russ­ian mil­i­tary forces. The lat­ter film ends with a griev­ing man amongst the ruins cry­ing, ​“This is my Ukraine.” Each short film in Over­com­ing the Dark­ness places human­i­ty at its cen­tre – as well as the despair, pain, joy and com­mu­ni­ty that neces­si­tates endur­ing unprece­dent­ed times.

The impulse to cap­ture and share ordi­nary life in extra­or­di­nary cir­cum­stances has also spread to social media. Both Babylon’13 and Kino Dopo­mo­ha are using Tik­Tok, Insta­gram and YouTube to quick­ly dis­trib­ute their short works, while many Ukrain­ian cit­i­zens are becom­ing the direc­tors, cin­e­matog­ra­phers, gaffers and sub­jects of their own films. As our phones have become cam­eras, mics and screens all rolled into one, social media has had a sig­nif­i­cant impact on doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ing in the last decade, chang­ing how sto­ries are for­mat­ted, accessed and shared.

While some insti­tu­tions are trou­bled by social media plat­forms becom­ing sites of doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ing and exhi­bi­tion, DocFest embraced the poten­tial of Tik­Tok at this year’s fes­ti­val, curat­ing a selec­tion of videos called A Tik­Tok War. Videos with mil­lions of views like, ​“Pov: you are live in Ukraine”, ​“What I Have In A Bomb Shel­ter” and ​“How My Mom Cooks Blinchi­ki In A Bomb Shel­ter”, were screened in DocFest’s Alter­na­tive Real­i­ties pro­gramme and offered inti­mate, wit­ty and bit­ter­sweet glimpses into the life of Ukraine’s teenagers and future documentarians.

In a war­zone, the bound­aries between pro­fes­sion­al and ama­teur, film­mak­er and cit­i­zen, objec­tive and sub­jec­tive, per­son­al and polit­i­cal sim­ply col­lapse. As we’ve seen in recent doc­u­men­taries, shot on the ground dur­ing con­flicts in places like Hong Kong, Libya, Syr­ia, Egypt, Iran and now Ukraine, the urge to cap­ture and share news is bor­der­less. As time pass­es, undoubt­ed­ly more doc­u­men­taries from the front­lines of Ukraine will be pro­duced, but this ear­ly pro­gramme at DocFest rein­forced the artform’s pow­er to pre­serve even just one person’s per­spec­tive of a sin­gle day, one that is both extra­or­di­nary and total­ly mundane.

At the post-screen­ing Q&A for One Day in Ukraine, an audi­ence mem­ber asked the film’s pro­duc­er, Igor Savy­chenko, about prepar­ing to cap­ture the inva­sion. A sea­soned doc­u­men­tar­i­an who has been with Babylon’13 for near­ly a decade, Savy­chenko seemed total­ly at ease with the poten­tial dan­gers of cap­tur­ing a war in real-time. ​“We knew what to do,” he answered with a shrug. ​“So, we did it.”

The 2022 edi­tion of Sheffield DocFest ran between 23 – 28 June. More infor­ma­tion on the festival’s Ukrain­ian pro­gramme can be found here.