Intercepted (Oksana Karpovych, 2024)

Read in Croatian here.

A ruin is recognizable by its incompleteness and dysfunctionality. To observe it is to reconstruct in one’s mind the reasons and steps that led to the destruction of the former structure. A ruin speaks to its observers through an absence they constantly attempt to fill—fragmentation compels them to ask a myriad of questions. Placed within the context of war, a ruin is read as a material trace of violence. As part of a documentary film image, it becomes a synecdoche of a specific war, one with spatial and temporal coordinates. Precisely because such an image contains so little—remaining unexplained and requiring the viewer to mentally reconstruct what is missing—it fosters deep contemplation of the catastrophe’s scale, without relying on individual tragic fates or faces to elicit empathy.

Documenting war-torn Ukraine in 2022, Oksana Karpovych‘s film film Intercepted / Myrni ljudy (2024) captures the devastation of infrastructure, from mined walls and emptied interiors to a severed overpass. By opting for a mostly static camera, she transforms these scenes into horrifying tableaux vivants. Other shots map landscapes in motion, evoking the perspective of a military vehicle driver. Christopher Nunn does not fix his camera on people—though human figures occasionally appear—but rather on spaces extending from the Kyiv region southward and eastward toward Kharkiv and Mykolaiv. Images otherwise filled with nothing but inconsequential noise are accompanied by the overlaid sound of intercepted phone calls between Russian soldiers on the battlefield and their loved ones in Russia. As shots of a former living room, a school classroom, or a basement sheltering civilians unfold, the voices of mothers, sisters, and wives or girlfriends can be heard. They encourage their sons, brothers, and partners in their military tasks, reassuring them even that brutal acts in this context are normal and understandable, that they themselves would act the same and take equal pleasure in the suffering of an enemy who, they believe, fully deserves it. The Ukrainian Security Service has been publicly releasing such recordings since 2014, ever since Russia has occupied Donbas.

Karpovych returned to Ukraine to work as a television producer after spending nine years in Canada. Shortly afterward, the latest Russian invasion—still ongoing—began. Intercepted, a French-Canadian co-production, premiered at the Berlinale in early 2024, where it received Special Mentions for Amnesty International Award and Ecumenical Award. The film has also been nominated for the LUX Audience Award presented by the European Parliament and the European Film Academy (online voting is still open across the European Union). The award aims to promote European cultural diversity and increase the visibility of European film productions, with the winner being decided equally by public votes and Members of the European Parliament, each contributing 50% to the final score.

It is precisely the contrast between the paradoxically calm images—dynamized only by a passing breeze, sparse traffic, and the limited activities of people in the landscape—and the aggression of the recorded phone calls that makes Intercepted a deeply unsettling experience. For the purpose of her concept, the director used as many as 76 different conversations, aiming to present the breadth of Russian beliefs about the war while omitting descriptions of events on the ground that she felt might seem excessive to the audience. Even this strictly controlled representation of Russian actions in the occupied territories is profoundly disturbing. Soldiers reveal the logistical challenges posed by corpses, both human and animal, as well as the resource shortages they face. Many of the descriptions and incitements from the women on the other end of the line are filled with hatred and a relentless push for further aggression, frequently accompanied by remarks about how Ukrainians have more than Russians, live better lives, and should be stripped of that advantage.

Nonetheless, the calls also capture soldiers’ disillusionment with the Kremlin’s official narrative—mobilized Russians witness the reality of war, one that domestic media does not show their families. The regime’s willingness to falsify the true state of affairs even becomes a source of conflict in some of the conversations. In certain cases, women try to convince the men that the state’s interpretation of the war is true, only to be met with denial. In others, women attempt to dissuade the men from their loyalty to propaganda, warning them that they are nothing more than cannon fodder for Russian imperial ambitions. Many of the arguments they use are economic or rooted in realpolitik, but they seem to have little effect.

Compared to other documentary portrayals of the war in Ukraine that focus on the Ukrainian experience—most notably last year’s Oscar winner 20 Days in Mariupol (20 dniv u Mariupoli, 2023) by Mstyslav Chernov—Karpovych’s film does not rely on graphically harrowing scenes and deliberately maintains a distance from the urgency of wartime reality. The director establishes a different ethical approach to the cinematic representation of trauma, employing methods that align with the concept of counter-cinema, paraphrasing Peter Wollen’s theoretical essays. The narrative flow is disrupted by the fragmentary presentation of information, a single locus of identification with an actant is denied, content that would rationally seem crucial is withheld, and sound exists externally to the image. In other words, Intercepted defies many expectations tied to dominant (documentary) filmmaking conventions, provoking the audience to step out of passive reception of victim narratives and, indirectly, take a stance toward the aggressors.

In a Balkan context, Karpovych’s highly intelligent direction recalls that of Ognjen Glavonić in Depth Two (2016), a film about the systematic Serbian killings of Kosovar Albanians, whose bodies were secretly transported by the Belgrade authorities for burial in the Batajnica area. There, too, the discursive dimension takes precedence over the composed, observational treatment of the image. Glavonić overlays his visuals with interviews conducted with witnesses to the horrific events. These testimonies effectively reached the public for the first time. The director’s film image is even less provocative in a denotative sense–the captured landscapes reveal nothing on the surface to indicate that they were sites of concealed crimes. Similarly, Karpovych finds meaning in space itself, in its impersonal quality, but she also documents existing technological and environmental destruction—an approach shaped by the fact that, while inscribing catastrophe onto the landscape, she is depicting a present reality.