QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Best remembered for his fearless dissections of political and social systems in Close Relations (2016) and Eastern Front (2023), 61-year-old documentarist Vitaly Mansky now turns his camera toward a city that lies physically distant from the frontlines yet remains spiritually and emotionally under siege.

Filmed over the course of a year – from summer 2023 to the summer of 2024 – the film portrays Lviv as a paradox of beauty and bereavement. At first glance, it appears serene: lively cafés, tourists wandering through cobblestone streets, trams sliding past old Austro-Hungarian facades. Yet beneath this seeming normality lies an omnipresent rhythm of loss. The Hetman Petro Sahaidachny Military Academy Orchestra, once performing at parades and public celebrations, now plays almost exclusively at funerals. On the hardest days, the musicians attend up to six burials, their instruments echoing the weight of collective grief that has become the city’s daily pulse.

Mansky, born in Lviv in 1963, seems to return not as a native son but almost as a guest, observing a city that reveals to him primarily its postcard image – its historic grandeur, tourist avenues, and curated charm – especially in the film’s first part, where the war, though present, often recedes behind the aesthetics of the city’s cultural facade.

Mansky’s approach is characteristically unadorned. He refuses to guide the viewer through commentary or overt emotion, allowing images and fragments of speech to tell their own story. Funerals unfold in quiet dignity; processions flow through the streets as onlookers kneel in respect. Between these ceremonies, Mansky captures the unseen labor that sustains mourning: gravediggers expanding cemeteries already overflowing, artisans engraving new plaques, and orchestral musicians adjusting to their new wartime roles—a pianist turned drummer, a wedding trumpeter now playing the march of farewell.

The film’s title, Time to the Target, refers to the five-and-a-half minutes it takes for a missile to reach Lviv from its launch point. This grim calculation defines a new rhythm of life – one where every air raid siren and brief silence carry equal weight. Mansky transforms this idea into a visual metaphor: the interval between peace and catastrophe becomes the pulse of the film itself. Every frame seems to exist precisely within that suspended time, oscillating between vitality and vulnerability.

Despite its gravity, Time to the Target never succumbs to despair. The film carefully balances tragedy with endurance. Between funerals, Mansky observes small gestures of life continuing in defiance of death: a street musician playing near the opera house, tourists snapping photos in front of churches, a newborn being blessed. These moments do not trivialise the surrounding grief – they highlight it by contrast, suggesting that the act of living itself becomes a quiet form of resistance.

The passing of seasons provides the work’s temporal and emotional structure. Autumn leaves fall onto fresh graves; winter snow turns black on the cemetery paths; spring arrives, but the funerals persist. Through these cycles, Mansky renders time as both continuity and burden. Yet within this slow, relentless repetition lies the essence of his vision: the recognition that mourning and life are no longer opposites but parts of one circular experience shared by the entire city.

One of the most striking sequences features posthumous medals being handed to grieving families – mothers, widows, children receiving symbols of honor for those who will not return. Here, Mansky silently connects present sorrow with the unresolved past. Many of the soldiers’ death dates stretch back to 2014, intertwining the ongoing war with the first rupture of Crimea’s occupation. The film becomes a living archive, where the borders between past and present are blurred by perpetual sacrifice.

At 177 minutes (that’s nearly three hours), Time to the Target demands patience, but its length is deliberate. Repetition becomes its moral form – forcing the audience to feel, rather than merely recognise, the numbing continuum of war’s consequences. The monotony itself transforms into a gesture of fidelity; it refuses to allow grief to be compressed or forgotten. Time to the Target is both elegy and testimony. It is Mansky’s most personal and humanistic work, built from silence, resilience, and the fragile beauty of survival itself.

Time to the Target just premiered in Doc@PÖFF Baltic Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.