When the full-scale Russian invasion started, I was in Ukraine and happened to be working as a local producer with Al Jazeera English News. This work allowed me to access many places in different regions of Ukraine, where I witnessed Russian war crimes. At night after work, I developed a habit of listening to the “intercepts”: intercepted phone calls of Russian soldiers in Ukraine calling their families back home that were obtained and publicly released by the Ukraine’s security services. The discrepancy between the brutal reality that I was living during the day and the things I was hearing at night was shocking. In the intercepts, the Russians sounded human. That was the most painful thing to accept: Why do humans do such inhumane things? This question has brought me to the film, which is based on a simple juxtaposition of two realities as a means of trying to understand the full complexity of the “Russikiy mir” (Russian world) and to comprehend what kind of thinking is behind the invasion. Its interpretation is open for the viewers.
Oksana Karpovych
