The Bushido samurai philosophy states that to live properly, you have to understand and accept death. That philosophy takes on a very contemporary relevance in Ukrainian director Yuliya Hontaruk’s new documentary To Die To Live (a Special Screening at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival). The filmmaker’s three protagonists, Shakhta, Potter and Dancer, who joined the army in 2014 and experienced the terror of the battlefield in Eastern Ukraine, each has a very close relationship with death.
In the film, they try to re-adjust to civilian life but they’re aware that the Russians haven’t gone away, and that they are only at the start of a conflict that will soon get much bigger.
When Hontaruk first started working on the project a decade ago, it had the title, Company of Steel, named after the regiment the men served in.
“I chose the three characters and then started following them at war, but then they came back home,” she remembers the Minsk agreement of early 2015 that led to a ceasefire in the so-called ‘Donbas War.’
The director’s focus then shifted. She realised this was going to be a documentary about coming home as much as one about war itself. “For around six and a half years, I filmed them in civilian life,” she says of three main characters.
Then, of course, in February 2022, came the full-scale invasion. This was an event that Shakhta, Potter and Dancer had long anticipated – and it meant that they again returned to the front line.
“People at war accept [the possibility of] their own death and it really changes you,” Hontaruk elaborates further about the new title of the movie, chosen only relatively recently. “This transformation is really important and powerful inside a person. It is a key to this film. You need to find your desire to live – and life is stronger than death.”
The three men in the film are volunteers. They went into the army to protect their county and their homes. They all had civilian jobs. For Shakhta in particular, Bushido teachings were crucial in enabling him to make sense of the upheaval and chaos in his life and to deal with his PTSD.
To Die To Live unfolds in a very masculine world. However, the director says she always felt accepted by the soldiers. They respected the fact that she was living in the same conditions they were, joining them on the front line. “In some ways, they opened their world to me.”
When they returned home, she realised how damaged and fragile they were.
The film is full of strikingly framed shots of the characters, seen alone in empty railway carriages or on a skateboard or dancing manically to heavy rock music. Nothing was staged. Hontaruk had become so close to the three men that they accepted her filming them at the rawest, most vulnerable moments of their lives.
“Everything was totally observation. It was my main goal to be close to these people and to open up their world and what they were thinking – to try to show the truth.”
At certain points, the director was operating the camera herself, without her cinematographer or sound technician. This enabled her to achieve greater intimacy with the protagonists.
Ukrainian soldiers don’t cry – or at least these ones didn’t. They tended to try to keep their emotions firmly bottled up. It therefore became a challenge for Hontaruk to show audiences what they were going through. The editing was crucial. Rather than bombard viewers with words, Hontaruk takes a more subtle and poetic approach. “You need to feel this PTSD…”
Forests feature prominently in the documentary. It was in the woodland that the men experienced some of their worst moments of danger and dread during wartime – but they also find peace and calmness in nature.
Hontaruk is one of the co-founders of Babylon 13, the internationally renowned filmmaking collective set up in 2013, and which exhaustively chronicled the Maidan protests. She has an intriguing background for a director having originally studied Thermal Energy and Process Engineering before turning to filmmaking.
“In fact, we have a lot of directors who had their first education in engineering or mathematics or something with physics. I don’t use it in my life but it helps me to know how to work with editing programmes,” she reflects. “And it’s good for directors to have different experiences in their lives.”
Some of the 2015 footage seen here has been used before on the Babylon 13 YouTube channel, or in her earlier series Fortress Mariupol, about the soldiers surrounded by the Russian army at the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol in 2022.
“My idea was to show people like me. It’s my generation. They were young, students or with jobs, and now they were starting to fight. It’s a portrait of a generation of Ukrainians.”
Financing came together relatively late in the project. The film received support from the IDFA Bertha Fund and was also pitched at Cannes Docs. Sunny Side of the Doc, HOT Docs, EFM, Odes, Dok Incubator, Karlovy Vary and various other events. After the full-scale invasion began, Uldis Cekulis from Latvia and Katarina Krnačová from Slovakia came on board as co-producers. The main producers are Hontaruk herself, Ivanna Khitsinska, Oleksandra Bratyshchenko and Ihor Savichenko.
Following the Karlovy Vary world premiere, the film is expected to surface in Ukraine at the Odesa International Film Festival later in the summer.
Did the director herself experience some of the same trauma as her characters? “I am not a soldier,” she parries the question. “But it is a story about transformation – and about my transformation too.”
“The war isn’t finishing. Now, all of us in Ukraine have this PTSD,” she continues. “It doesn’t matter if you are in the battlefield or in Kyiv because in Kyiv we all the time have these rockets and massive attacks – and when you feel death, you start to value life more.”
Editing itself was often perilous with constant air alarms. “We are working with rockets nearby. It’s strange to work on a film when you don’t know what will happen at night or if all the hard drives will be destroyed. All of us made back-ups…you grow a little paranoid because you understand that tomorrow your studio could be destroyed,” Hontaruk ends.
