Two female directors tell the story of Russia’s war in Ukraine from both sides of the trench with a handheld camera

The coffins are identical. Only the flag that flies next to them changes. The Russian flag in one film, the Ukrainian flag in the other. When he presented the programme of the 81st Venice Film Festival in July, artistic director Alberto Barbera said that sometimes at a festival “films dialogue with each other”. Songs of Slow Burning Earth, Olha Zhurba spent months filming how victims of Vladimir Putin’s imperialist ambitions in Ukraine survive and resist. Russians at Warby Anastasia Trofimova, He accompanied the troops sent by the Russian president to conquer Ukraine to the very front. No one questions that one country invaded and the other defended itself. But the joint viewing of the two works, which are being screened these days in the competition, offers a different perspective on the conflict that broke out two and a half years ago. The enormous differences, but also the points of contact. And a practically unprecedented view, from within the Russian army.

The laments and tears of mothers, fathers and widows are also similar. In two different languages, but with the same pain and sense of injustice. On both sides of the trench, devastated buildings are filmed, the search for corpses and poor devils afraid of dying. In both documentaries, citizens are seen who have devised similar solutions to avoid being shot: those who painted “people” on the outside walls of their houses, those who wrote “children” on the windshield of their cars. Even soldiers are interviewed who, despite their convictions and the thousands of kilometres that separate them, claim the same warlike motivation: “If I don’t go to war now, my children will have to.”

Since February 2022, many correspondents have been describing the suffering and endurance of Ukrainians. So much so that some images of Songs of Slow Burning Earth They are sadly familiar: the crowds to load women and children onto trains fleeing kyiv; the siege and starvation in Mariupol; the air raid warnings, bunkers and bombings; the graves of soldiers and soldiers who are walking again thanks to prosthetic limbs. “It was impossible to think of a film, because it implied a plan for the future. Would we be alive? Under occupation? We began to film reality as witnesses, not knowing whether it would be for a minute, an hour or a day,” explains Zhurba.

Almost no one, however, had managed to show the side of the aggressor. But the Russian-Canadian Trofimova was only able to complete the film after leaving her country: she filmed what propaganda would not want shown. But at the same time, she turns the mass of monsters that Europe fears into a group of human beings. With all that entails: “Living with them made me understand how far the slogans are from reality, which is made up of death, loss and uncertainty. The same thing they told me about.” War and Peace, Nothing New on the Western Front and so many other novels.” The military themselves admit on camera that no one has really filmed their daily lives, much less the official media loyal to Putin. The director hopes that her work will somehow be able to circulate in Russia, at least on-line, although he admits that he still doesn’t know how.

“I came as a volunteer after seeing an advert on TV, six months. This is my seventh. They say you can only go home feet first. I wouldn’t have come if I had known. I had plans. We don’t want to kill or die,” Vitaly, a 37-year-old Russian military cook, tells the camera. “They send us to die with our eyes closed, like blind kittens,” laments Cedar, 35, before an attack on enemy lines that is one of the most devastating moments in the documentary.

Because Russians at War offers what its title says: a real view of the military, with their ideals, their dilemmas, their disillusionment and their breakdowns. When they cook pasta in a giant pot, shiver in a bunker, get drunk, recover the body of a friend or complain that they have not received their salary for months. A soldier asks a colleague to marry him and then confesses how “scared” he was that she would say no. In the middle of the bombs. At other times the woman in question, Anchar, a 21-year-old doctor, explains that the “fucking war destroys everything” but swears not to abandon “the boys.”

There are fanatics, convinced that Ukraine is full of Nazis or afraid that the enemy might kill them. There are also skeptics, driven by the desire for money, women or revenge more than by patriotic faith, confused by phrases like “I need to know that I am right in combat, but I don’t feel it here” or “I don’t even know why we are fighting.” Some are critical of the president and his propaganda. Others only ask for peace and tranquility for themselves and the opposing side, and do not know how to get out of it. Or they resign themselves: “I will continue. We have no choice.”

“I didn’t know what to expect. In the media they were either faceless heroes or war criminals. My biggest surprise was realising that they were ordinary people.” Not all bloodthirsty, some introspective, others not at all. And most of them asking me, since I was coming from the capital, when the war would end.”, Trofimova points out. Among other things, because the Russian media keeps telling them that they are winning, but when they manage to connect with Ukrainian radio stations, they find that they are saying exactly the opposite. The filmmaker had already filmed the war in Iraq, Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo. So when her country started another one, she felt an obligation: “I couldn’t not make this film. I started to scratch at all the stories around me,” she says. Until, on New Year’s Eve 2022, in the Moscow metro, she found Santa Claus.

Under that disguise, as seen at the beginning of Russians at War, Ilya, 49, was ready to go to war in a few days. So the headmistress followed him. Home, when he promised to come back alive and his little daughter said: “And not wounded!” And then to the front, where Trofimova ended up spending seven months in the company of a battalion of her compatriots. She says the officers snorted, cursed her, threatened to throw her out. But in the end they let her stay. She knew she could end up arrested, injured or even worse. She thought it over thoroughly, took the risk and, from then on, she says, never thought about it again.

Krasny Liman, Bakhmut, Kleechevka. And in the Ukrainian documentary, Pravdyne, Ivano-Frankivs’k, or a bakery in Mykolaiv. Both creators travel around the country, camera in hand, to gather as many places and voices as possible. Far from the palaces of politics: on the street, where people live and die. “All these horrors become part of your daily life and it’s crazy,” shares Olha Zhurba. In addition to their courage, the directors agree on another reflection: what they show is hard, but the war is much harder. Although, in that respect, the films make different decisions. The Ukrainian one did not want to get close to the front, which the Russian one stepped on. And while Songs of Slow Burning Earth sets the limit of harshness in not showing corpses, Russians at War goes much further.

“I tried to film the dead with all possible respect. No faces or gruesome details, but rather to focus on the interaction of the living with those who were no longer here,” says Trofimova. The last part of the documentary, however, contains an exception. The director films the moments before and after a Russian offensive in Kleechevka. “I am not ready to risk my life,” says one soldier. “They are sending us to a massacre!” shouts another, in a fit of hysteria.

Those who manage to return later remember what they saw. A comrade shot himself because he understood that he would not be able to get out of there. Cedar tells how he played dead, after receiving a splinter in his back, and slowly walked out on the ground. But, in addition, the soldier shows, and the film reproduces, a video of how a drone drops a grenade on a wounded soldier to finish him off. He is seen making the sign of the cross before the bomb hits. “We decided to include it because all this radically changed his perspective, from being quite anti-violent to totally justifying war,” argues the filmmaker.

“This is not Putin’s war. The country has long-term plans to cover the world with conflicts. It is known that the deep, large-scale militarisation of children in Russia and the occupied territories has been underway since 2012,” denounces her Ukrainian colleague. More generally, children have a certain role in both films.. Olha Zhurba records at the Ternopil state school900 kilometres from the front, where a class draws out their dreams: to be a black belt in karate, to win Ukraine or to “have dad and mom back”. The alarm of a possible attack breaks the spell of normality and forces children and teachers to run to the shelter.

Soldier doctor Anchar, after getting engaged to her boyfriend, springs another surprise in the documentary. It turns out that she got pregnant in the trench.

—What are you going to tell him about the war? —the director asks her.

—I don’t want to tell him anything. Ninety percent of it is lies. And he wouldn’t understand these things. That people at the top make money and others die. How do you explain that to a child?

The Ukrainian filmmaker captures the absurdity of the conflict in a conversation between a friend of hers and his daughter: before going to sleep, the little girl asks if the missiles kill selectively and gradually or if they kill everyone at once. The father confirms the latter. Then, apparently, she lies down and falls asleep more peacefully.