When Russian troops invaded Ukraine in the early hours of Feb. 24, 2022, documentary filmmaker Olha Zhurba was seized by an “apocalyptic feeling” that life as she knew it had come to an end. Her first impulse was to take her camera onto the streets of Kyiv to record history as it unfolded. “I just understood that I want to be here, in the middle of this historical, transformative, apocalyptic time in Ukraine,” Zhurba tells Variety.
Several hundred miles away, Russian-Canadian filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova, who was working as a part-time news producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Moscow bureau, was shooting a segment on the Russia-Ukraine border when news of the invasion broke. Her team continued filming a live hit on their hotel balcony as Trofimova went back to her room, reeling from the “profound shock” of what Russian President Vladimir Putin characterized as a “special military operation.”
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Hours later, she woke “with this incredible feeling that your life, yourself and your identity is completely broken. Everything that you believed in is thrown out the window,” the director says. Before long she, too, began to record scenes of the war as it was experienced on the home front, before embedding with a Russian army unit for an unprecedented look at the soldiers fighting Putin’s war on the frontline.
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Two years later, “Songs of Slow Burning Earth,” the sophomore feature by Zhurba, and Trofimova’s “Russians at War” are premiering at the Venice Film Festival, where both films are screening out of competition. Taken together, the two documentaries offer a striking portrait of a conflict that has dragged on for close to 1,000 days, while also illustrating how the unbearable cost of war has disproportionately fallen on the victims of Russia’s unprovoked act of aggression.
Speaking to Variety from Kyiv on the eve of the festival, Zhurba — whose feature debut, “Outside,” premiered at CPH:DOX and Hot Docs just weeks after the Russian invasion — recalls the tumult and confusion of those first days in Ukraine. 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 first weeks of Russia’s military campaign, when many feared that Kyiv itself might fall and Ukraine would be ruled by an occupying army, a massive mobilization effort was underway: to evacuate the country’s most vulnerable, to serve on the frontlines, to marshal medical supplies and other resources for the soldiers and volunteers on the battlefield.
With time, however, 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 says. “Where is the limit of this perception of destruction, war, death? Where is the limit of our adjusting to this?”
Back in Moscow, Trofimova — who left Russia for Canada at the age of 10 and returned 17 years later — witnessed a different, equally unsettling type of normalcy taking hold, as 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, the director watched the creation of an alternate reality that would help prop up the Russian war effort.
“If you travel around Russia, it doesn’t feel like there’s a war going on,” Trofimova says. “People live their lives. Cafés are open. Everything is business as usual.” A veteran correspondent of conflicts in Syria, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo and elsewhere, the director hitched along with a Russian army unit and traveled to the war’s frontline, hoping to puncture that illusion of normalcy while also searching for a better understanding of what the soldiers taking up arms against Ukraine 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 that’s been laid waste by Russian soldiers and missile strikes, whole towns and villages razed to the ground while the survivors attempt to pick up the pieces. For the countless unidentified bodies salvaged from the rubble or retrieved on the battlefield, many find a final resting place in a potter’s field, their simple graves marked by a wooden cross and an epitaph that reads: “Temporarily unknown defender of Ukraine.” The destruction wreaked on the country has been absolute. Whatever cracks have begun to show in a Russian economy that has faced unprecedented global sanctions — or in a society that has increasingly, if not always loudly, questioned Putin’s war effort — the country itself remains whole. Those fighting in Ukraine have families and homes to return to.
Trofimova’s portrait of Russian soldiers is largely sympathetic — likely too sympathetic for some, as the director herself acknowledges — and viewers may ask whether a documentary that depicts war from the perspective of an invading army can fully reckon with its toll. “Russians at War,” however, strives to put a human face on the countless disposable and interchangeable cogs in the Kremlin’s relentless war machine, with Trofimova illustrating how many of the soldiers fighting Putin’s war have been misled by government propaganda, conscripted against their will, or lured — whether by lofty, misguided ideals or the promise of a phantom paycheck — to fight a war whose purpose few can explain. “There was an order. We went in,” as one soldier bluntly puts it.
Such justifications aren’t likely to move the millions of Ukrainians whose lives have been upended or destroyed by Putin’s folly, and there are many who will undoubtedly question the Venice programming team’s decision to include “Russians at War” in the official selection. (The festival did not respond to a request from Variety to discuss its decision-making process.) For her part, Trofimova made the movie at considerable personal risk; when the production consulted lawyers in Moscow, according to the director, one compiled a list of potential criminal articles violated by “Russians at War” that ran for nearly three pages. “We don’t know what the reaction will be [after the premiere],” Trofimova says.
The question of where the conflict goes from here, however, and what will remain in the aftermath is one that neither filmmaker is able to answer; it will be left to historians to make sense of another senseless, misbegotten war. “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 understand fully, to analyze it and reflect and to heal.”
That painful reckoning remains a good way off, 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.”
