“Unflinching in bringing war to our cinematic doorstep as a reminder that behind the abstract headlines you read every day there is the suffering of real people.”

“Where do I live now?”

Earlier this year Oksana Karpovych’s impressive documentary Intercepted premiered at the Berlin film festival. Still one of the best films of the year, it was a stark reminder of the horrors that war can inflict upon people, not only its victims but also its perpetrators. Still, the film was remarkably hopeful and a testament to resilience. The latter is also true for Olha Zhurba’s Songs of Slow Burning Earth, but ‘hopeful’ is not an adjective that feels fitting for Zhurba’s grim look at Ukrainians handling the devastation, despair, and grief that the war has brought to their doorstep. Starting on that fateful early morning in February 2022, the film over a period of two years tracks Ukraine’s population slowly getting used to the dark abyss of war and the trauma that it brings, trauma that should never be normalized but by necessity is. Equally impressive to Karpovych’s effort, Songs of Slow Burning Earth is unflinching in bringing war to our cinematic doorstep as a reminder that behind the abstract headlines you read every day there is the suffering of real people.

The film opens in a way that is not unlike Stefano Savona’s great COVID documentary The Walls of Bergamo, with distressed citizens calling emergency hotlines to get a grasp of what is happening and what to do. Explosions are heard everywhere, and the night sky is ablaze. “Is it war?” asks one of them, a question that is met with a resigned acknowledgement. So the displacement begins, of people fleeing the approaching front in packed trains or plotting routes by car that will take them out of contact with advancing Russian troops. Mariupol, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, all names that the world was barely aware of before this war, become tangible when people who actually were born there, worked there, lived there are shown undergoing a forced and emotional departure, leaving everything behind. And that includes friends and loved ones, often shot to bits. Zhurba is a bystander in these scenes, the proverbial fly on the wall. It shows the instinct and bravery of a war journalist (which Zhurba is not by profession), but what these often silent scenes also do is show a keen eye for cinema. Broken tank treads on a deserted road, a misty morning landscape in eerie silence except for the sound of shelling, too many people trying to fit into one of the few trains that is still running; they become beautifully composed still lifes in front of Zhurba’s lens. Can devastation and despair look beautiful? In Songs of Slow Burning Earth they can, as a sort of soothing song to make the horrors go down easier.

Not only is the compositional work strong, Zhurba also has a knack for making human drama play out in such a way that it becomes a gut punch. In a long scene filmed through the window of a truck as it winds its way round a snowy mountain road, you initially are wondering what the point is. As the truck approaches a town more and more people show up at the side of the road, and as they notice what is passing them by they all kneel in respect. When it finally arrives at a church greeted by hundreds of kneeling figures, the emotional realization of what the truck is carrying washes over you like a tidal wave. Scenes of rows of freshly dug, empty graves or graves that are adorned with signs stating “Temporarily unknown defender of Ukraine” need no explanation, no voice-over, no dialogue. It would lessen their impact, and Zhurba is keenly aware of that. It is in scenes like this that Songs of Slow Burning Earth becomes a kindred spirit to Intercepted, which equally lets the images do the talking.

Which isn’t to say that the film is entirely silent. There are several accounts of the trauma people have been going through, spoken by them in voice-over as they are filmed going about their day. In these cases the weight IS in the words. In one particular case a young boy tells of the fear and panic when Russian soldiers entered their town, rounding up Ukrainian soldiers and able-bodied men alike; his father was shot in the foot by a Russian soldier, he says, and when he speaks about the soldier’s commander asking the boy if he should kill ‘him’ in front of the boy’s face it is left hanging for a moment whether he meant the soldier or the boy’s dad. As the boy recounts the story we see him and his friends playing at war, like all boys of his age do at times. Except this boy has gone through actual war and seen its horrors up close, such as the time when he and his dad found a body that was barely recognizable anymore, half a head missing and with destroyed limbs.

The matter-of-factness with which these stories are told, even by a child, shows a numbing in the hearts and minds of these people, a resignation that life goes on despite the pain and sorrow, despite the missing limbs, the missing homes, the missing loved ones. Zhurba’s quiet, observant style manages to perfectly register people going through the motions because they have to, as the enemy is still at the gates so there is no time to properly mourn, no time to work through trauma. The film makes this clear by showing the distance to the front for each new scene; people working in a bread factory not even 20 kilometers from active fighting is an incredible thing when you think about it. War is around every corner in Ukraine, always near in some way, but its people have to pick up the pieces and go forward. Songs of Slow Burning Earth renders this sentiment solemnly and with great care, creating a powerful document of the horrors of war and the resilience of humanity. But it’s not hopeful. Sure, removing traces of Soviet occupation is good for morale, but two juxtaposed scenes at the end of the film – in which Ukrainian teens have no answer to the question: what can they do to ensure the future they dream of, on the one hand; and Russian teens on the other, 3400 kilometers from the front, marching in unison singing war songs – show that the future of Ukraine is far from secure. It is a sober conclusion to the film and a warning to Western audiences that support for Ukraine is still critical, because this war is far from over and the people fighting it are at breaking point.