Showing for the first time as part of IDFA’s International Competition (where it won the Award for Best Cinematography – see the news), Silent Flood [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk
scheda film] is the second feature by Pamfir [+leggi anche:
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trailer
intervista: Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk
intervista: Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk
scheda film] director Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk and is a documentary portrait of a pacifist community living in a remote part of Western Ukraine. After the film’s premiere, Cineuropa sat down with the Ukrainian helmer to discuss the process of making a movie about people who live in harmony with nature, at the mercy of the nearby river and in proximity to war.

Cineuropa: It’s been three years since you were promoting Pamfir. How do you find the festival context here at IDFA, since presenting a Ukrainian documentary, unfortunately, carries a different weight than it did back then?
Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk: I'm simply absorbing everything around me here, and from that point of view, being at IDFA, everything back home feels like a parallel reality. I’m also happy to be able to have a different kind of experience and to share it with my family – it was my son’s first time travelling by plane! So, I’m just observing while I’m here, in this place where anybody could be a filmmaker showing their film at IDFA, anyone you meet on the street even, which makes it a more truthful reality than at other festivals.

You mentioned that this movie arose from your interest in the precise place and the relationship between humans and the environment. How do you approach storytelling in this particular film, and is it any different from how you approach storytelling in your other works?
I fell in love with the documentary form back in film school; in my second year, I started filming documentaries, even though we didn’t have any lessons or even a documentary tutor. I was so interested in creating something with my own two hands, and I liked that when making a documentary, you’re not dependent on other people – it could just be you and the camera. I was inspired by this freedom, but I also find it challenging to escape the established form of “talking head” interviews. I wanted to find my own way to overcome it.

At the heart of it, what you're interested in is people's stories and the way they tell them, even if they’re not represented in the traditional kind of way.
Yes: it’s tricky to have this interest when you see something that everybody else sees, but you feel like you can find an angle to describe it that no one else can find. This is how I choose the subjects of my films – it has to be something that’s a self-sustained system, like a community or a family. They have their own planet, their own laws of physics and gravity, and that’s what I want to discover.

Regarding the structure of Silent Flood, we move through seasons, but also shared universes. These people share the land as well as the context and the present-day history of war, even if they don’t share a past. How did you come up with this flow? It's rhythmical in a beautiful way, and gets more political and more emotional as the film progresses.
The answer is simple: we go through time and through places, and they all unite in one field. There, we can hear the voices of the past – those who were children during the wars back then – and the voices of children today, who are also growing up during wartime.

I was also thinking about the roles of tenses – past, present and future – in every part of the film, and I can't escape the feeling that they, too, overlap.
Yes, it’s a double or even triple exposure [of stories] in the same place, but with the difference that what once felt bad now feels good. This aspect arose the first time I met members of the community, when I came to the area to go rafting on the river. I saw so many bridges damaged in World War II that were just left like that because there was no reason to rebuild them. I was on the river, surrounded by nature and those bridges from the past, and that was the particular feeling I wanted to capture with this film. It was my first inspiration.

For this film, you worked alongside three other cinematographers. There is a particular softness to the image at all times, which is especially noticeable when the light is low.
The idea was to create images that would look and feel like paintings. We didn’t use any artificial light, and we sought out those sunsets and sunrises – a lot of beautiful scenes actually happened during those magical moments. I also like fog, which we had a lot of there, since it’s a river canyon, so we were lucky to be able to use it as a natural effect.