What went down when the war first broke out in Ukraine on 24 February 2022? For many Ukrainians, their first action was a phone call to the emergency services. “There are explosions,” a voice on the tape says. “What’s going on?” another one echoes. “We don’t have any information yet,” the operator says in an attempt to calm them down. As Olha Zhurba’s Songs of Slow Burning Earth [+leggi anche:
trailer
intervista: Olha Zhurba
scheda film] premieres out of competition at the 81st Venice Film Festival, the full-blown conflict has been raging for two-and-a-half years already.

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We might think we have seen it all in documentaries since it started, from the early days of shock to a perpetual state of war, via aggression, the swapping of intel, weapons shipments, the displacement of Ukrainian citizens, and even prisoners of war. Indeed, Zhurba’s sophomore feature-length documentary does at first also offer familiar sights: the migration of refugees, the smoke from explosives in the abandoned countryside, the roadblocks, and the rusting or crumbling tanks, cars and houses.

But Zhurba is not in it only for the shocking moments or the footage from the frontline. The more provocative shots of animal carcasses plastered across empty stables and live grenades stuck in the ground are merely peppered throughout a film that aims to dive deeper. She covers a lot of time, distance and emotions – from places such as a bread factory in Mykolaiv, 18 kilometres away from the frontline, to the Superhumans Centre, a rehabilitation facility in Lviv, located 1,020 kilometres away, and from the early, panicked reactions to daily life amidst the ongoing war.

How does war change a society? How does one get numbed by the daily horrors? Is it a form of extreme survival? As we see sights such as a distressed crowd at a train station in Kyiv, where people keep pushing their way onto the train like it’s the lifeboat on a sinking ship, unimpressed bakers sorting bread during an airstrike, or kids “playing war” in the garden, taking shelter occasionally whenever a plane flies low above their heads, we surmise that one adapts, for better or for worse. “I’m going to war so my kids don’t have to do it later,” was one dead man’s pragmatic motive for fighting. But the question is, what “later” is there for these kids?

This is a generational conflict, Zhurba makes this much clear. It’s one that might not be solved tomorrow, or on Monday, as a group of schoolchildren define the term “future”. Maybe it makes them more pragmatic, but maybe it also allows them to dream big. “What are you willing to do to make it happen?” is the question asked during a brainstorming exercise at a secondary school, focusing on how to improve the country. The young generation does not have an answer yet. But when a young boy, snatched by Russian soldiers, is asked what side he and his family are on, “We are for peace,” is his response. Because idealism and hope, after all, are the gifts that will keep on giving.

Songs of Slow Burning Earth was produced by Moon Man (Ukraine), Final Cut for Real (Denmark) and We Have a Plan (Sweden). It is sold internationally by Filmotor.