Olha Zhurba
Songs of the Slow Burning Earth
Pisni zemli, shcho povilno horyt'
UA, DK, SE, FR
2024, 95', uk, ru
Age 12+

 

The final sunset and the only future are swallowed by a dark, impenetrable cloud. Hundreds of anxious people outside a train compartment, a mother with her newborn in a shelter, a grandmother with her grandchild on a bench, those leaving and those staying behind. High-rise buildings with shattered windows gaping like open mouths, a car marked with "children" scrawled in red marker, deep sadness etched into the eyes of the elderly. The torment of uncertainty gives way to chords of horror – as the days and months pass, these become the suffocating routine into which everyone is thrown without choice. Unwittingly, the new reality stifles thoughts of the future – can you even think of tomorrow when your feet can’t touch the ground of your homeland, a land on fire? Can anyone see through the flames?

Ukrainian poet Maksym "Dali" Kryvtsov, killed in action on 7 January 2024 at the age of 33, once wrote: "When they ask me what war is, I’ll answer without hesitation: it’s names." Two and a half years have gone by since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and Ukrainian filmmakers continue to reflect, remind, and call for help for their land – a land slowly burning, as described by the director of this documentary screened at the Venice Film Festival. Created as an audiovisual diary, it chronicles living memories, landscapes, and places. Memories that should never have been born, landscapes that should never have been seen, and places where Ukrainians should never have been. As the creator of the film says, her piece is "the backdrop of the (meta)physical landscape of a collective disaster, a new generation of Ukrainians aspires to imagine the future".