Ukrainian filmmaker Oleh Sentsov is sitting in a brightly lit condo in Kyiv, spouse Veronika by his facet, hand cupping his proper ear. “What? What? What?” he says, asking Selection to repeat the query. Greater than two years on the frontline of Ukraine’s conflict with Russia have offered Sentsov with few possibilities for levity, however he permits himself a mischievous grin. After struggling, by his depend, “six contusions and two perforations” to his proper ear drum, the director has misplaced a good portion of his listening to. It might or might not return. Sentsov shrugs. A lot of his Ukrainian comrades, he is aware of, have suffered far worse fates.
It’s a degree pushed residence by the director’s newest movie, “Actual,” a documentary snapshot of the Ukraine conflict that world premieres with a particular screening on the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. Described as an “unintended” movie, the 88-minute characteristic is completely comprised of footage Sentsov shot in a trench in Ukraine’s Donbas area after a close-by unit was ambushed by Russian forces.
It’s a chilling glimpse of a fleeting second in a conflict that has claimed tens of hundreds of Ukrainian troopers and civilians because it started. Reliving that day remains to be a wrestle for the 47-year-old Sentsov, a father of 4 who expects to return to the entrance quickly. “It’s arduous to observe originally, however that is an immersive expertise,” he says. “There’s nothing pretend on this. It’s uncooked materials.”
The director is chatting with Selection on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the battle proven in “Actual.” Two days later, he’ll go to the widows of a number of troopers who had been killed that day by Russian troops. His close-cropped army minimize, arching in a excessive widow’s peak, has gone grey; so has the goatee framing his sq. jaw. Requested the way it feels to be residence in Kyiv, surrounded by his spouse and kids, his reply is terse, soldierly. “It’s higher than different locations,” he says. “Often, I’m in a foul place, so right here is sweet.”
“Actual” was filmed on the tenth day of a Ukrainian counteroffensive final June within the Zaporizhzhia area, within the nation’s southeast. Sentsov’s unit had been struggling to interrupt via the Russian protection line, however that morning, they’d obtained orders to penetrate deeper into Russian-occupied territory. Because the commanding officer, Sentsov rushed again to shore up his unit’s defenses with extra troops and provides, however a small detachment of Ukrainian troopers was minimize off at a place code-named Actual. “They had been surrounded by Russians on each facet,” he says.
Separated by greater than a mile of no-man’s land and below a relentless barrage of Russian artillery, Sentsov was the one one who may talk with the stranded unit, their appeals for assist rising extra plaintive because the day wore on. The siege lasted from roughly 4 a.m. till 8 o’clock that night; Sentsov started recording someday round 8 a.m., his digicam sweeping backwards and forwards throughout the ditch the place he and his unit had been dug in, as a soldier on the opposite finish of the radio referred to as for reinforcements. It was a stroke of pure luck that the scene was captured when Sentsov reached as much as alter his helmet, by chance turning on his GoPro, which recorded till the battery died. It will be six months earlier than he realized he had produced an eyewitness account of the conflict that started with Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
His preliminary impulse was to delete the footage. After watching it, nevertheless, he despatched it to his longtime producer, Denis Ivanov — his collaborator on “Rhino,” which premiered on the Venice Movie Competition in 2021 — in addition to different civilians who hadn’t skilled the conflict firsthand. He was uncertain if the footage had any cinematic worth, however they impressed upon him that what he had captured was “honest and trustworthy reporting” and “an actual doc of the conflict.” Ivanov would go on to provide “Actual” via his Arthouse Site visitors banner, in co-production with Boris T. Matić and Lana Matić of Croatia’s Propeler Movie and U.Ok. veteran Mike Downey of Downey Ink. Sentsov, who shares a manufacturing credit score, additionally assisted with the coloring and sound, holed up in a post-production studio in Kyiv throughout his uncommon breaks from the entrance.
Sentsov shot the footage for “Actual” after by chance turning on his GoPro within the warmth of battle.
Courtesy of Arthouse Site visitors
Most of “Actual” takes place over a number of sq. yards within the trench the place Sentsov and his comrades had been holed up, radioing the besieged unit whereas gun photographs and artillery blasts sound off-camera. It’s a unusual and off-putting viewing expertise, one which the director says mirrors, in no matter small method, the expertise of preventing itself. “Whenever you’re in a conflict, you’re principally blind. Ninety % of knowledge, you collect from sounds,” he says. “There’s a helicopter, there are artillery photographs, there’s preventing, there’s screaming. All that info, your mind is gathering not by seeing the objects, however by observing the sounds round you. It was crucial to point out this.”
Regardless of having no army expertise earlier than the Russian invasion, Sentsov has turn out to be battle-hardened after greater than two years on the frontline. On the day Russian forces swept throughout the border he joined Ukraine’s volunteer Territorial Protection, however inside a number of months he’d left to hitch the particular forces, telling a reporter for Le Monde that the volunteer unit was “too boring for [his] style.”
He posts recurrently concerning the conflict on social media, recounting his numerous scrapes with demise, providing tributes to fallen comrades and cataloging each the conflict’s bodily and emotional toll. “It was arduous to jot down about all this yesterday, after a heated battle,” he wrote after a slim escape final fall. “It’s arduous to jot down right this moment, already being protected. It’s going to be arduous to jot down tomorrow when it’s all going to be recollections and nightmares.” In one other publish, he wrote: “You solely actually really feel life when demise passes you by.”
Since making his debut as a filmmaker with the 2011 drama “Gamer,” Sentsov’s life and profession have been steadily sidetracked by geopolitical occasions in his restive area. In 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea and invaded the Donbas area, Sentsov — a Crimea native — was arrested by Russian authorities on trumped-up terrorism costs and sentenced to twenty years in a penal colony near the Arctic Circle. The director vigorously denied the accusations, at one level launching a starvation strike that lasted 145 days, whereas a global marketing campaign for his launch drew a coalition of governments, rights teams, trade our bodies, literary luminaries and Hollywood stars.
Sentsov was freed in 2019 after greater than 5 years in a Russian penal colony.
NurPhoto through Getty Pictures
In Sept. 2019, he was released as a part of a prisoner swap between Russia and Ukraine, and simply months later Sentsov walked the pink carpet on the Berlin Movie Competition together with his dystopian drama “Numbers” — a movie that he improbably wrote and co-directed whereas behind bars. He then filmed “Rhino,” against the law drama set within the Ukrainian underworld within the Nineteen Nineties, hoping to shut one turbulent chapter in his life and get a recent begin. When he appeared on the Lido for the movie’s Venice premiere, he told Variety he was able to “pursue a civilian life” and depart the occasions of a tumultuous decade behind.
As soon as once more, nevertheless, historical past has intervened. Whereas Sentsov hopes to be in Karlovy Fluctuate when “Actual” premieres, there’s no telling what the conflict has in retailer; in Ukraine, he says, it’s not possible to plan greater than every week upfront. It’s too early, too, to take a position on when he’ll return to filmmaking, although he has no less than two options — together with his English-language debut, “Shining World” — presently within the pipeline. “Proper now, I’m a soldier. I’m in fight and I do what I’ve to do,” he says. “However I’m assured that sooner or later, I’ll make motion pictures.”
Till then, he stays targeted on the day-to-day wrestle of defending his homeland, defending his troopers and dwelling to once more see his household in Kyiv, together with a toddler born after the Russian invasion. As he posted just lately on Fb: “Having a house the place your loved ones is ready for you offers a complete totally different stage of motivation right here on the entrance strains. You already know precisely who you’re risking your life for, you realize precisely who you must survive for.”
