26/08/2024 - Lesia Diak's tender portrait of a Ukrainian war veteran as a father is not afraid to interrogate itself

Fatherhood may not come with as big of a laurel as motherhood does, but the intricate ways through which parents and children relate to each other leave their marks on every documentary portrait they partake in. Dad’s Lullaby [+see also:
trailer
film profile] is Ukrainian director Lesia Diak's own attempt to understand a man's relationship to war and family, and the film becomes a real meeting ground for different walks of life. This intimate documentary, premiering as part of Sarajevo’s Documentary Competition, was mostly shot between the four walls of an apartment in Kyiv, in 2018. As the title card informs us, the film’s subject, Serhiy Zinchuk, has returned from the Eastern front where he fought Russian soldiers for the last three years. In the first scene, his three sons—Sasha (11), Artem (8) and Nikita (3)—wake him up for breakfast.

Domesticity means safety, but any war veteran like Serhiy will feel ambivalent towards that otherwise innocuous concept. Diak's camera captures him attentively performing the rituals of parenthood, like dressing, cooking, feeding, and playing, yet there are moments where he raises his voice and loses his temper, both off screen and on. It’s accurate to say the film is a complex portrait at least, but Dad’s Lullaby does not regard itself as such. It leaves the impression of a humble, gentle attempt at understanding something through the means of something else; or in this case, someone through someone else.

In one sequence, cut up and inserted at various points in the film's 78 minute runtime, Serhiy and Diak take turns holding the camera up to one another’s faces and discuss love, war, and loss. Far from a performative move, the inclusion of these segments transforms the film completely: in them, the director implicates herself (in the positive sense) as someone who is trying to understand a knotty personal issue. Recently broken up with her boyfriend, also a war veteran who decided to go back to serve, Diak bares her emotional disposition in direct address, while Serhiy holds the camera rather shakily. He speaks with the confidence of someone who has been on the other side and shares the perspective of PTSD, without ever naming it as such. The content of these scenes is moving and earnest to the point of being cutting, but it is through this open dialogue that the two can reveal more of themselves than in any other visual or discursive way. 

“What kind of love do you have for him: as a person or as a person who’s returned from war?” This is just one example of the prodding questions Serhiy asks Diak across the kitchen table. Questions of responsibility and the desire to rid yourself of it connect parenthood, coupledom, and army life in a free-flowing yet tough conversation. It’s astounding how big of an impact keeping these self-reflexive scenes can have on an otherwise linear documentary and Lesia Diak is sensitive enough as a filmmaker to give in, in service of these moments of shared connection.

Dad’s Lullaby is a Ukrainian production from DramaFree, Filmways (Romania), in co-production with Croatia’s 15th Art Productions (petnaesta umjetnost).