Intercepted

What drives the people who come to your country to wage war? Intercepted is an attempt to find an answer by showing two parallel worlds. The camera registers images of destruction in unhurried shots, in which we see Ukrainian villages, towns, houses and motorways after their liberation from the Russian occupation. We look closely – not into the abyss of destruction and death, but rather at landscapes being filled again with life. This gives hope and serves to balance out the media’s normalization of horror. They are frames set against the flood of images. Throughout the film, the soundtrack forms a shocking counterpoint. We listen to the recordings of telephone conversations intercepted in 2022 by the Ukrainian Secret Service between Russian soldiers in trenches in Ukraine and their families. It’s hard to decide which element is more devastating: the soldiers’ confessions of the rape, looting and brutal torture of Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war or the (mainly) female voices from “back home” that bear witness to chauvinism and hatred, disinformation and schizophrenic propaganda. Sound and image stare each other in the face, stunned, brought together in a cinematic space. (Yuliia Kovalenko)

Oksana Karpovych, Ukrainian-Canadian filmmaker, writer and photographer born in Kyiv. She is a cultural studies graduate of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and a film production graduate of Concordia University in Montreal. She worked as a local producer with international reporters covering Russia’s invasion in Ukraine in the spring of 2022.

Production Giacomo Nudi, Rocío B. Fuentes. Production company Les films Cosmos (Montreal, Canada). Director Oksana Karpovych. Screenplay Oksana Karpovych. Cinematography Christopher Nunn. Editing Charlotte Tourres. Music NFNR. Sound design Alex Lane. Sound Artem Kosynskyi. Co-producer Pauline Tran Van Lieu, Lucie Rego, Darya Bassel, Olha Beskhmelnytsina. Co-production Hutong Productions, Moon Man.

World sales Lightdox

Films: 2015: Lost (short documentary). 2017: Temporary (short documentary). 2019: Don’t Worry, the Doors Will Open (documentary). 2024: Intercepted.

Bonus Material