The world premiere of the Olha Zhurba’s sophomore feature, the documentary Songs of the Slowly Burning Earth, takes place at the 81st Venice International Film Festival. According to the Ukrainian filmmaker, participation in the prestigious event opens her paths to a wider audience. More people will see the film, and this is also an opportunity to spread a robust anti-war message and a denunciation of Russian terror. The movie is a tragic mosaic of everyday life scenes, captured during the first two years of the full-scale Russian invasion. It laments the normalisation of the war experience.

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Natalia Serebriakova – Your film is very hard to watch. Is this something you set out to achieve?

Olha Zhurba – I believe that war is the worst thing that can happen to mankind. In my film, I never compromised. I tried to convey this feeling of horror through cinema. In reality, war is a lot worse. What you see is merely a reflection of reality.

NS – How did you decide to make this documentary?

OZ – Well, it all started when the war began. I ask myself the same question as, probably, most Ukrainians.. What do I feel now? What can I do? What do I want to do? What is my reaction? And I remember being surprised that I wasn’t as scared as others in my neighbourhood. I live in the outskirts and I watched as people left the city in a panic. I was surprised that I did not want to run away. It’s strange, I guess, but I didn’t panic at all. Instead, I realised what I could do. I am also part of the process. I had to decide whether to stay or go, whether to join the army in the first days, or to volunteer. I was amongst those who decided to stay.

This is a large scale historical event. I don’t know where it will lead, what will happen next. But I realised that the best I could do as a professional filmmaker was to capture the everyday events. I really wanted to see more than my yard. I want to see more, and gain a better understanding of what I was seeing in the news.

NS – Did you immediately know that you would make a movie with the images you were capturing?

OZ – At first, I thought that maybe these images will be needed later. Somewhere, somehow, sometime. In the first months of the war, I remember very well the feeling that the Russian military was advancing everywhere. There were questions about whether we would even be occupied or not. It is impossible to think about a film in these conditions. It’s a little morbid to think about a movie at the beginning of a war. I had a reaction, an impulse. I thought that we would all disappear, but this footage would someone survive as a testimonial.

NS – Why did you decide to capture the evacuation of people from the Kyiv railway station?

OZ – That’s a decision I made on the first days, February 25th or 26th., My first thought was that people were probably coming from all the cities, and that a lot of people would have gathered at the station by then. I went out there myself with a camera. I saw with my own eyes this feeling of the apocalypse. It was in the air, in the eyes of my loved ones.

NS – You have three operators in the film. How did you manage to create a single visual style with three different people? The film looks like a single statement.

OZ – The cameramen who joined this project are extremely talented people. They are hard-working cinematographers. I’m very grateful to each one of them. Someone like Slava filmed only two sequences with me. Vova Usyk was with me almost the whole time. He and I, let’s say, lived through the war together. And Misha Lubarsky had to shoot one of the most difficult sequences, from a moral and from an ethical point-of-view. I’m very grateful that he just went for it. And why does it all look one single piece? Because I was there. We never had any creative conflicts. These three people trusted my filmmaking instincts.

Slava Tsvietkov and I talked at the beginning about how we would shoot it. And we both then had the feeling that in this chaos, you want to hold on to the tripods in order to examine all the details. We also decided that we shouldn’t be too emotional, because the events are dramatic enough as the are. I wanted to craft a sense detachment. And my second thought came from this idea of creating an archive. I wanted to have some very long takes. The viewer should watch each action and event for as long as possible, without cuts and montage.

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Olha Zhurba is pictured at the top of this interview. The other two images are stills from Songs of the Slowly Burning Earth.