Any sense of respite from war that Olha Tsybulska and her friends feel right now is very much an uneasy one. She lives in the Ukraine but battle is still waged in the east, and there is no knowing what the despotic leader of Russia is likely to do next.
As the notes for the 30-minute project You Know It’s Going To Be About War read, people start going back to their regular lives “despite the intangible danger of missile strikes hanging over cities as the need for normality begins to overpower the fear of death… As war becomes a routine without an end in sight, it is a journey of celebrating life despite the war.”
Against this horrendous and uncertain backdrop, the like of which most people in Europe believed we would never again see, Tsybulska seeks to gather responses and comments on the existentialist dilemma from friends and family of her own generation (she is 26). Her film is produced by John Emil Richardsen of Montevideo Tromsø AS (Norway).
When asked to articulate her own responses to the war situation right now, she speaks primarily of the sense of guilt that she and her friends feel. “I feel guilt for not doing enough. And then I discovered that I’m not the only one,” she says. “We all feel we have a collective responsibility for helping our country and…whatever you’re doing, it never feels like you’re doing enough.”
The guilt is two-pronged, she adds. The first is a “survivor’s guilt” born out of living in a “relatively safe place” in the west of Ukraine, seeing a sense of normality descend around her as the war continues in the east of the country. “And then there is another question of whether you can enjoy really your life while other people in the other regions are under occupation and they [the Russian military] are murdering civilians. So there is this kind of dilemma that is just haunting you all the time.”
“I was [also] very interested to notice in myself…that I have a lot of hate and rage…very powerful emotions that I did not really experience before,” Tsybulska adds. “To be honest, I’m not a kind of person who feels a lot of anger, but in this situation this is the feeling that I noticed was shared, and that’s why I wanted to explore it as well. Yes, of course, for very obvious reasons we feel a lot of anger and hate, but at the same time…we also understand that this is a very powerful emotion that we need to direct somewhere in order for it to be productive.”
Before the outbreak of war Tysbulska was working as a freelance editor for commercial projects, but wanted to find different avenues into the industry, eventually finding her way to Kyiv-based production company Minimal Movie where she was working as a director’s and producer’s assistant on documentary projects until the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Tsybulska remembers the sense of ‘unreal’ that she felt in early 2022 during the days prior to the invasion. “I had my birthday ten days before the invasion. And I remember it was already two/three months of very intense news-following. And everyone was talking, and the US was saying multiple times that there’s going to be an invasion and there was a lot of tension, a lot of stress. And we were gathering together with friends and we thought how crazy it is that we are discussing that we might need to go to bomb shelters in Kyiv. And we thought that this is so surreal.” Now she finds it equally surreal to look back at the apparent naivety of that conversation.
“Our government very obviously saw it coming,” she adds. “After the invasion in 2014 until now, the reason why Ukraine is responding so well is because we have this time to understand who our enemy is. And also we were preparing to fight with the second best army in the world (which did not happen to be true – but that’s another story). But in terms of Ukrainians and just people…I think we were not ready for the full scale invasion. We did not believe that would happen.”
Tsybulska is confident that the project, pitching August 15 at Sarajevo FF, will be ready for consideration for Autumn 2022 festivals. Production company Montevideo is based in Tromsø, Norway and run by Norwegian/Northern Irish duo John Emil Richardsen and Richard L Butler. After working with commercial productions both in Norway and around the world for the last seven years, they decided in 2022 to go back to their roots to produce fiction films and documentaries.
Docu Talents from the East is curated and organised by the Ji.hlava IDFF. See: https://www.ji-hlava.com/docu-talents
