Oksana Karpovych’s new documentary film ‘Intercepted’ refreshingly looks at the problem of the war in Ukraine. There have been many brave documentary filmmakers and journalists who have gone into the war since its outbreak in February 2022, but Karen Karpovych has captured many of the iconic imagery of Ukrainian resilience shown in documentaries and media including the well-done documentaries “20 Days in Mariupol” “Porcelain War”, but this time around using the voicemails of Russian soldiers to their family back home as the main audio for source material. Putting together the images of what Russia has done to its neighbor with words of soldiers of Russia explores how the psychological emotional and physical consequence of such and similar military campaigns will affect not only the current but all future generations on both confrontational sides.
The intersected film explains that, mothers and wives were the mostly used subjects of Ukrainian special services who recorded and posted Russian soldiers’ personal calls making it to the citizens of the states. These clips included in this documentary were taken from taped calls made from March through to November 2022. As it is obvious from the clips it appears and stops short of a violent confrontation. Troops are still worried about what their wives think and what their mothers think. Many of these calls are to their soldiers who have been deployed. They want to know where their men are and when they will return to them.
The soldiers are at a standstill because they are in a position from which they cannot give away their position to which all they can do is wish the conflict comes to an end quickly. Some of the calls are too bad to be able to bear, for instance soldiers giving their last will over the phone, children calling out for their father, some inquiring whether what is this war for while some others justify the incursion by saying that it is to protect the boundaries. The most personal aspect of this conflict in our lives is enjoyed terrorism and its disinformation. The most horrible calls that one needs to hear are of rage and skin-head mania when some Russian soldiers believed that they might have originated the terminologies which called for the slaughter or bruted the message that Ukraine should be ripped and brought forth sickening tortures and endups, that Ukraine was enjoyable and it made sense to torment Ukrainians. “You do understand that I am going mad here”, a soldier, talks over the phone to his mother. She also reassures him that, “They are not human beings.”
The calls themselves can be distressing, but at the same time it is Karpovych who compares the how awful violence is greeted in detail with grotesque alone paralysis and devastation caused by non-functional and broken-down houses, tranquility of people waiting for goods or running errands, and being active as if there was no war to put a damper on the people’s lives.
The synopsis describes a series of images of living people in the very “mild” scenes of people’s gatherings but not for a second does it make us forget of the images that were previously shown – images of destroyed tanks, of bombed out houses, of almost uncountable piles of ruins. This adds to the list of people who in Russia’s instructions, are normal people but, soldiers are let loose onto their enemy. The buildings and homes exhibit varying levels of destruction. Many such homes have lost their glass sashes so that their drapes expand with the breeze as though mourning the deceased residents of the house. Others have torn liquor posters and pale ash, remains of what they irrefutably endured and saw. Rather they are serene still lifes, throughout which appeared intercepted phone conversations that pull the reader in.
Whose calling the documentary and findings become a huge and disturbing photo essay of disruption of weight, of millions of people’s lives already disrupted by war. It’s easy to ignore fighters such as the one in Karpovych’s film; however, this particular film goes to the root and seek the reasons of how and why these people have come to just kill Moses, Gerald, and a host of others by mere sight, to inflict shameless torture, and to explain the rationale of the invasion of the country’s borders in the first instance right through the film. Even though the voices of Ukrainians are not heard in the film “Intercepted”, Karpovych’s observational film bears the dominant idea of the Ukrainians’ will triumphing over Karpovych’s camera.
In “Intercepted”, the poli walls still reachable by constipation of the people combine phone confessions with in forcible silence the ruins and the survivors and this shows how savage government propaganda is to the people as well as others.
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