At the Berlinale, the war in Ukraine told through the voices of Russian soldiers – Technologist

The press officer warned us, Ukrainian director and photographer Oksana Karpovych sometimes cries during interviews. “But it’s no big deal,” she said, it passes quickly. At the Berlin International Film Festival, whose 74^th edition runs until Sunday, February 25, the sweet-faced thirty-something-year-old with blond bobbed hair has been doing one interview after another, none lasting longer than twenty minutes. This flurry of media attention started when journalists discovered her documentary, Intercepted, presented in the Forum section, which is devoted to avant-garde content.

The film, which does not yet have a distributor in France, is a strange journey through the liberated territories of Ukraine, following Russia’s invasion on February 24, 2022. The experience is unforgettable and far more original than Abel Ferrara’s documentary Turn in the Wound, screened as a special viewing, mixing accounts from Ukrainian soldiers and civilians with recitations of poems by Patti Smith.

We entered Intercepted like a painting, with still shots taken from the interiors of destroyed houses. Then came moving images, taken from the windshield of a vehicle, staring at the road or muddy tracks. Some of these were filmed inside a Russian military vehicle, recovered as a trophy by the Ukrainians during the counteroffensive in Kyiv. As a symbol, Karpovych wanted to draw a path through regions where life was trying to get back on its feet. But what was also striking about Intercepted is its heady soundtrack of conversations about war.

We heard telephone calls from Russian soldiers on the Ukrainian front, to their loved ones – their wives, mothers or children. These calls were intercepted at the start of the conflict by the Ukrainian secret services and made available online. Karpovych has seized on this material, using some thirty hours of recordings, made between March and the end of October 2022. She also obtained one hour of exclusive recordings, which she edited and included in the film.

Trivial chatter

Born in Kyiv, Karpovych studied “cultural studies” (i.e. sociology and political science) at a university in Ukraine and lived in Montreal for nine years, where she discovered photography and documentary filmmaking around 2010. “Art and politics led me to make films. And I found these recordings very rich in understanding not only the soldiers, but also Russian society,” she said.

Some of the messages are quite down-to-earth. One soldier explains to his mother that he is eating “good ice cream” and wearing “designer clothes.” “Ukrainians live better than we do,” he says. “With all the support they get from the West!” she quips back. Another man tells his wife he’s going to bring her back “make-up samples,” as if he were returning from a business trip.

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