The conversations are chilling. Russian soldiers are calling home after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. They chat casually to their loved ones about the trainers and electrical goods they’ve been busy looting. They also sometimes mention, as if in passing, how they’ve been torturing and killing the local people.
In her new documentary Intercepted (sold by Lightdox and premiering in Berlinale Forum) Ukrainian director Oksana Karpovych plays snippets of these phone calls (all of them intercepted secretly by Ukrainian security forces). On screen, at the same time, we see images of the desolation and havoc the Russians are leaving behind them in Ukraine.
“It was in the first days of the invasion that I started listening to them…the effect they had on me was of some kind of cognitive dissonance,” the director says of the intercepted calls. “It was really shocking and very painful to realise how absurd they were.”
Karpovych, who is based in Montreal, had moved back to Ukraine three weeks before the invasion. “It was mostly for personal reasons. I had lived in Montreal for nine years. [But] the subject of my research is Ukraine and Ukrainian society,” explains the director, whose first feature documentary film Don’t Worry, The Doors Will Open [2019] was a closely observed film about a train in Ukraine and the passengers who travel on it.
“Before the full-scale invasion, I was working on a different project. My plan was to move back to Ukraine to be able to work intensely on it.”
There were already ominous signs. The Russian forces were assembling on the Ukrainian borders. “Many people, my close ones in Montreal, were trying to stop me going back to Ukraine but somehow I had this gut feeling that it was actually the best time for me to be in Ukraine and see what is going to happen.”
Even so, the director was shocked by what she was seeing. “It was as if the world had turned upside down in a split second and the images were not able to express the pain I was feeling,” she remembers.
After the full-scale invasion, she had worked as a producer with reporters from the Al-Jazeera English team. They were witnessing the daily attacks on Kyiv and the Kyiv region.
“Seeing the attacks and listening to the intercepts gave me the idea for this film. On the one hand, it is quite simple. It is just the juxtaposition of two parallel realities. On the other hand, it was very complex [to make]…”
The intercepted conversations were freely available on the official YouTube channels of the Ukrainian security service. They were being posted online regularly.
“I realised how rich was this material,” the director says. She was keen to access some of the other unpublished, unedited recordings but the security service wouldn’t let her have them. They were being used in investigations into war crimes by the Russians. “That was the explanation we received.”
At first, the director was disappointed. Her interest wasn’t simply in the recordings that were indicating crimes. “I wanted to build a longer and more complex narrative that also shows the escalation of violence and the different grades of violence and crimes. I wanted to show the dehumanisation. For this, I needed material that was not necessarily interesting to the Ukrainian security service.”
What she was looking for, she clarifies, were “typical human interactions,” the kinds of conversations that anybody, anywhere in the world, could relate to.
“As soon as I listened to 30 hours of audio, took notes and logged it, I realised it was really enough to make a feature-length film. It required lots of creativity and craft from me and my editor. It was obvious from the start that it wouldn’t be an easy editing, but I felt we had enough to tell a complete story.”
One of the most shocking aspects of the recorded conversations is the disdain the Russians show toward the Ukrainians. They talk about them as if they are mere animals, not human beings.
Where did this loathing come from?
“It’s so complex that it’s really not easy to answer….obviously, historically, we [Ukraine and Russia] have a very close relationship. When it comes to our private lives, most Ukrainians have relatives and friends in Russia, including me and my family. However, the war cannot start without that hatred.”
Karpovych believes that encouraging the hatred “was a long-standing strategy of the Russian government.” This was happening before 2014 and the Maidan revolution, and before the full-scale invasion of 2022. Without the hatred being in place, the Russians wouldn’t have behaved in the way they did. The director adds that many Ukrainians had already begun to “lose their connections” with Russian contacts after 2014. “It has already been 10 years that we have not had any normal relationship….relatives, family members and friends in Russia became full of hatred for us. It’s something that so many Ukrainians grieve today.”
The images that Karpovych uses show devastation as if it’s part of everyday life. She was working with British photographer and cinematographer Christopher Nunn (who also collaborated on her previous feature).
Karpovych felt that media footage of the war was simply not capturing her personal experience of the war. The western reporters always felt the urge to “show once again violence.” The director, though, was far more interested in its aftermath. She wanted to show “the horrible sense of time being suspended…we needed to focus on something more subtle, not the straightforward images of violence. I wanted to show something that is much more profound to me.”
Certain other movies inspired her. She talks of Depth Two (2016) by Ognjen Glavonic; Revision (2012) by Philip Scheffner; 48 (2010) by Susana Sousa Dias, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) and Chantal Akerman’s Sud (1999).
“All these films, they investigate the past and the crimes that were committed in the past. They work in a similar way. They combine interviews or audio-recordings with images that are not directly illustrating them…and they’re often slow paced!”
Intercepted was produced by Giacomo Nudi and Rocio B. Fuentes. After Berlin, it’s expected to screen widely on the festival circuit. Its Ukrainian premiere is set to be at Docudays UA in June.
Now, the director is turning toward a new project, a documentary looking at Stalinist repression of the 1930s, a period in which she lost her great-grandmother. “In 1937, she was arrested and executed in Kyiv as the enemy of the Russian people. Of course, her case was fake as were most of the cases at that time. She was basically a victim of the Stalinist ethnic cleansing…I think with the full-scale invasion, the subject of repressions and totalitarianism became even more actual than ever before,” Karpovych concludes.
