A tale of two filmmakers: Documenting the Ukraine-Russia conflict
The dawn of a new reality
When Russian troops invaded Ukraine in the early hours of February 24, 2022, documentary filmmaker Olha Zhurba felt an overwhelming sense of an impending apocalypse. Her immediate reaction was to grab her camera and head to the streets of Kyiv, determined to capture history in the making. “I just understood that I want to be here, in the middle of this historical, transformative, apocalyptic time in Ukraine,” she reflects.
Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, Russian-Canadian filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova was working as a part-time news producer for a Canadian broadcasting company in Moscow. She was filming a segment on the Russia-Ukraine border when the news of the invasion broke. Her team continued their live broadcast from the hotel balcony, while Trofimova retreated to her room, grappling with the “profound shock” of what Russian President Vladimir Putin termed a “special military operation.”
Capturing the chaos
Hours later, Trofimova awoke with a profound sense of disorientation. “It felt like your life, yourself, and your identity were completely shattered. Everything you believed in was thrown out the window,” she recalls. She soon began documenting scenes of the war from the home front before embedding with a Russian army unit to gain an unprecedented look at the soldiers fighting on the frontline.
Two years later, Zhurba’s sophomore feature, “Songs of Slow Burning Earth,” and Trofimova’s “Russians at War” premiered at the Venice Film Festival, screening out of competition. Together, these documentaries offer a poignant portrayal of a conflict that has dragged on for nearly 1,000 days, highlighting the disproportionate toll on the victims of Russia’s unprovoked aggression.
The first days of war
Speaking from Kyiv on the eve of the festival, Zhurba recalls the chaos and confusion of those initial days. Arriving at Kyiv’s central railway station one morning, she witnessed the mass evacuation of mostly women and children trying to flee the country. “It was the image of this chaos that I also felt inside,” she says. “I saw what I was feeling.”
In the early weeks of Russia’s military campaign, when many feared that Kyiv might fall and Ukraine would be occupied, a massive mobilization effort was underway. People were evacuating the most vulnerable, serving on the frontlines, and marshaling medical supplies and other resources for soldiers and volunteers.
Adjusting to a new normal
As the Russian advance was stymied and the war became a grim new reality for millions of Ukrainians, Zhurba felt compelled to document how the conflict had “started to be a part of our life.” “I needed and I wanted to show this collective transformation of society which is adjusting to the war,” she explains. “Where is the limit of this perception of destruction, war, death? Where is the limit of our adjusting to this?”
Back in Moscow, Trofimova witnessed a different, equally unsettling type of normalcy taking hold. The Kremlin’s propaganda efforts seized control of the narrative around the war, hiding its brutality and human cost from the average Russian. As the months wore on, with draconian laws and vicious crackdowns stamping out the country’s fledgling anti-war movement, Trofimova observed the creation of an alternate reality that would help sustain the Russian war effort.
The illusion of normalcy
“If you travel around Russia, it doesn’t feel like there’s a war going on,” Trofimova notes. “People live their lives. Cafés are open. Everything is business as usual.” A veteran correspondent of conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Trofimova joined a Russian army unit and traveled to the frontline, hoping to puncture the illusion of normalcy while also seeking a better understanding of what the soldiers believed they were fighting — and dying — for.
In her director’s statement, Trofimova observes that “the pain of war is universal,” but as the two films make clear, that pain is not evenly shared. Zhurba’s elegiac documentary captures a country devastated by Russian soldiers and missile strikes, with entire towns and villages razed to the ground. Survivors attempt to pick up the pieces, while countless unidentified bodies find a final resting place in potter’s fields, marked by simple wooden crosses and epitaphs reading: “Temporarily unknown defender of Ukraine.”
A human face on the war machine
Trofimova’s portrayal of Russian soldiers is largely sympathetic — perhaps too sympathetic for some. Her documentary strives to humanize the countless cogs in the Kremlin’s relentless war machine, illustrating how many soldiers have been misled by government propaganda, conscripted against their will, or lured by misguided ideals or the promise of a phantom paycheck. “There was an order. We went in,” one soldier bluntly states.
Such justifications are unlikely to move the millions of Ukrainians whose lives have been upended or destroyed by Putin’s folly. Many will undoubtedly question the Venice programming team’s decision to include “Russians at War” in the official selection. For her part, Trofimova made the movie at considerable personal risk; when the production consulted lawyers in Moscow, one compiled a list of potential criminal charges that ran for nearly three pages. “We don’t know what the reaction will be [after the premiere],” she admits.
The uncertain future
The question of where the conflict goes from here, and what will remain in its aftermath, is one that neither filmmaker can answer. “We don’t have time to reflect on this pain and this trauma that we’re going through,” Zhurba acknowledges. “Now we’re just in the process of reacting and adjusting. We can’t fully understand, analyze, and heal.”
That painful reckoning remains a distant prospect, with no end to the current conflict in sight. But it is a process that the two countries — bound by history, culture, and geographic fate — will eventually have to face. “We can’t erase this country or transport ourselves somewhere else,” says Zhurba. “We will always be next to this aggressor country.” Or, as Trofimova frames it: “Russia’s not going anywhere.”
For more information on the documentaries mentioned, you can watch the trailers for Songs of Slow Burning Earth and Russians at War.