Sculpting In Time

Documentaries such as Intercepted and Songs of Slow Burning Earth grapple with the Russian occupation beyond displays of desolation

- Debanjan Dhar

IN her 1996 classic Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, Oksana Zabuzhko writes, "The Ukrainian choice is between non-existence and an existence that kills you." A swell of documentary deep divessome direct, others lateral-has burst out of Ukraine in the aftermath of the Russian occupation, which began in February 2022. They are searching, mournful examinations on the "Ukrainian choice". The best documentaries curl underneath hard-nosed facts and numbers to propose a gutting, psychological, emotional immersion.

Oksana Karpovych’s Intercepted (2024) pushes into and grapples with the psyche of on-ground Russian soldiers deployed in Ukraine. The film opens north of Kyiv, before heading south and east, ostensibly mirroring the trajectory of the invasion as it unfurled. Karpovych was working as a producer for Al Jazeera in the country when Russia invaded Ukraine. Ukrainian security forces intercepted the radio transmissions among the on-ground Russian soldiers. These included calls they made to their families back home. Soon, these were publicly released. Karpovych scoured through 30 hours of audio clips and set out with a minimal crew, capturing the desolation seeping through the war-torn land. The film assembles calls intercepted from March to November 2022, placing them against a visual and geographical tour of Ukraine.

The dissonance between sound and image weaves something profoundly disturbing. As the calls are transposed against seemingly mundane scenes of Ukrainians getting through the day, there’s a deep sense of alienation and emotional purgation at play. It is as if our healthy, empathetic response to immense cruelty is being tested and our capacity to endure a barrage of violence every day is being assessed.