Ukraine, the documentary that tells how it is

Yellow and blue flag pin on his lapel, hands moving nervously as he speaks. Sergei Loznitsa, 59 years old, “among the most talented directors to emerge from the former Soviet empire”, as the magazine defined him Varietyis at the Cannes Film Festival to present his new film, The Invasion. A documentary in which he recounts the daily life of the Ukrainian people in the aftermath of the Russian invasion – video

LIFE FLOWS – “My attention was focused on how people survive, how they adapt, their resilience,” he explains to Today. Six years after winning best director in the “Un certain regard” section with Donbassand three years later being awarded the L’OEil d’or for best documentary with Babij Jar. Kontekst, on the massacre in which over 30 thousand Jews died in 1941, Loznitsa returns to the Croisette with a document that aims to keep the world’s attention high towards Ukraine. To make the film, you sent small crews from Lviv to Odessa, from Kiev to Dnipro. Once the camera was positioned, the recording proceeded for hours, to push the people filmed to forget about the lens scrutinizing them. “I don’t want to corrupt anything,” she explains. The result is a contemplative film, “a series of urgent, almost real-time dispatches”, dedicated to a nation determined to defend its right to exist.

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His film is called The invasion, but we don’t see the invader. Instead, there is a wedding, a bookshop full of customers, a lesson at school… Then it is the siren of the air raid warnings that brings us back to the truth of the moment. «I chose never to show the enemy. Visually it is never present in the film, but at the same time it is there in every single shot. The term “invasion” therefore has a broader meaning: war is not something that only happens on the front lines, but has a huge impact on everything else too. And it is not only felt in Ukraine, it is also felt in the rest of Europe.”

In what sense? «Every day we see footage of destroyed European cities on our screens. It has become a new normal. It’s something we’ve gotten used to by now. We are all protagonists of this event. But war is an illness, mental and physical, that affects the entire society.”

What does it mean to live in Ukraine today? «Everyday life is interrupted by an alarm, an air raid, and you have to leave everything and go and hide somewhere. This becomes normal, day after day, year after year.
The news never stops talking about this destruction and what is happening. Then there are relatives, friends, neighbors, who receive news of their children, their grandchildren, their loved ones killed. And so, I ask myself, how can one live like this? People who return to a normal life, even far from the front, don’t really return: their life can never be normal again.”

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In March 2022 you firmly opposed the boycott of the Russian cultural industry, to the point of being expelled from the Ukrainian Film Academy for your positions. “It seems to me that after two years, common sense has returned among the people and that people have stopped asking me if I think that boycotting Russian culture will help us stop the war.”

Is this why you also chose to include a sequence in which some Russian books are destroyed? «This too is the result of the war. It is understandable, a kind of natural human reaction, an expression of hatred towards the enemy. But the question to ask is: can we accept it? If a book, as an expression of an idea, is destroyed, it is terrible.”

Was it painful for you to make this film? «Every film I make is an attempt to share my feelings, my thoughts, my emotions with others. My cinema talks about pain. So this film is about pain: Ukrainians’ and my own. People who are not directly experiencing this situation are not aware of it and do not seem to worry that much.”

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Are the world’s political leaders forgetting about Ukraine? «The actions of politicians at the moment tell us that they have no intention of stopping this war. They just intend to support her, to keep her at a certain level. And this is very dangerous, because the Russian war machine is becoming stronger and stronger: European armies do not have much military experience and at some point they will have to face it. I don’t know if anyone other than the United States has the military capability. So what is being done to the skin of Ukrainians is a very dangerous game.”

Do you have a personal opinion on how this war will end? «I can only speak about what my intuition tells me: that is, nothing good. This war could end in a great catastrophe for Europe. In any case, it will take decades.”

Giulia Perona