“A work of contemplation that even at its short runtime feels a bit repetitive, but is nevertheless a stark and necessary reminder that human warfare costs more than just human life.”

With the number of casualties on both sides ranging in the hundreds of thousands, three years of war in Ukraine have taken an enormous toll on human life that will reverberate demographically in both countries for decades to come. But with this focus on the human cost of the war, what is often overlooked is the ecological disaster that is already wreaking havoc now, but will also have its effects on Ukraine’s nature in the long run. After a string of Ukrainian documentaries in the past few years that focus on the human aspect of the war, Dmytro Hreshko’s Divia, named after a Slavic nature goddess, aims to correct that through a show-don’t-tell look at both the damage to nature this war has caused, and also the way nature reconfigures herself and reclaims that which was taken from her. An immersive and oddly beautiful documentary about the destructive nature of war and the war of nature fighting back, Divia is a work of contemplation that even at its short runtime feels a bit repetitive, but is nevertheless a stark and necessary reminder that human warfare costs more than just human life.

It takes a while for war to creep into Divia, with the opening salvo of images being a collection of gliding drone shots that show the beauty of Ukraine’s forests and rivers, its mountains and desert. Look closely and you can already see the pockmarks in the land, remnants of relentless shelling along former frontlines. Suddenly plumes of smoke appear on the horizon, and a dark and ominous soundscape takes hold, a combination of Sam Slater’s sinister score and the eerie sound design by Vasyl Yavtushenko and Mykhailo Zakutskyi. Their work drives Divia, whether they mix in radio messages between military units under fire or a woman sobbing about the loss of life or shelter, or just despair. Futuristic bleeps and bloops accompany a scene of demining personnel searching for landmines, and an oppressive sound mix underscores somber shots of dead animals and carcasses. Some of Slater’s music sounds like old warplanes flying over.

As we observe nature, with wild horses and foxes roaming around the shot-up and burnt-out army material, we slowly see nature take over again though. Rusty tanks start to be overgrown by vines and moss, a destroyed village is slowly becoming green. Discarded ammunition boxes in a forest will be swallowed up by the nature around them, and bomb craters become small pools. Elsewhere, cleaning crews are taking out heavier material, while a mixture of military personnel searching for bodies and ecologists searching for ways to restore nature scour the land. Flooded towns, the result of broken dams, are another reminder that nature will always take back one way or the other.

As beautiful as the images are (shot by Volodymyr Usyk and Hreshko himself), and as important as the message they carry is, by virtue of how the film is set up and edited it starts to blend into the same imagery, never truly breaking the rhythm and generating a moment of surprise. Even at only 75 minutes you tend to look at your watch once or twice. It isn’t the fact that there is very little context given for the images; anyone who has followed the news on the war can connect those dots. But you’d be forgiven for thinking this is an episode of one of those BBC Earth series, albeit one that shows nature in its most violated state. Even so, Divia is a poignant film because it simply displays how destructive war can be. It is a film to ponder; the calm pace leaves plenty of room to do that, and there is enough striking imagery to hammer home the idea that we need to be careful with our world, even in a time of war.