QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM VENICE

The night is interrupted by a phone call. “I hear explosions. What is this?” – a female voice calls out to the rescue service. At the other end of the wire, they reply that they don’t know anything yet. “Is this war?” – the voice does not calm down. A minute of silence: “yes…” . These alarm bells open Olha Zhurba’s new creation.

On February 25, the day after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian filmmaker took to the streets with a camera. She had already decided for herself whether she should leave the country or stay. She went to the Kyiv railway station to film the people in the process of evacuation. The opening shots in her film are followed by a scene of panic and a stampede at the train station, where people are trying to leave for the relative safety of Western Ukraine. Zhurba bever panicked. Instead, she stoically observed the atmosphere of the apocalypse. She tried to preserve the archive of the War for future generations.

The next frame pierces the very heart: a 40-year-old man cries as he drives a minibus evacuating people from Mariupol. He talks about the children left in the destroyed city. This chronicle echoes Mstyslav Chernov’s Oscar winning 20 Days in Mariupol (2023). We do not see the city that became a ghost. Instead we watch the lost inhabitants. An emotional pensioner affirms that she built this city. A girl reassures her: the main thing is that her loved ones are alive.

There is no shortage of powerful scenes. lorry carries a coffin with the body of a Ukrainian soldier across Transcarpathia, an ethnically diverse region of Western Ukraine. A military woman mourns her brothers, in an affecting soliloquy. A mother has to identify her son’s body, her face frozen with shock and bewilderment. Towards the end, the film becomes increasingly symbolic and meaningful. Viewers see the dismantling of Soviet symbols from the Motherland monument in Kyiv.

Songs of a Slow Burning Earth is a melancholic elegy to the Ukrainian people, as a well as a rumination on its shared past with Russia. Zhurba’s sophomore feature mourn the war casualties, and laments the militarisation of a society (including schools and kindergartens) in neighbouring Russia. Putin’s regime is quickly reshaping the psychology of the masses.

Olha Zhurba is primarily known in Ukraine as a talented editor who worked on such documentaries such as Home Games (Alisa Kovalenko, 2018) and This Rain Will Never Stop (Alina Gorlova, 2020). She has also directed her own movies: the short film Daddy’s Sneakers (2021), about a child adopted by an American family, and the documentary Outside (2022) about a 13-year-old street boy neglected by his family and the state, who becomes a poster boy for the Ukrainian Revolution in 2014.

Songs of a Slow Burning Earth just premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, where it’s showing out of competition.