Intercepted

In the two years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Security Service of Ukraine has intercepted, recorded, and made public thousands of cell phone calls between Russian soldiers on the front line and their mothers, wives, and girlfriends back home. For her sophomore feature, Ukrainian-Canadian documentarian Oksana Karpovych charted a photojournalistic course across the country in the occupation’s wake to construct a fraught dialectical juxtaposition of sound and image, pairing fragments of those overheard conversations with arresting filmic compositions that capture the unsettled aftermath of invasion. Karpovych’s keen editorial sensitivity produces startling contrasts, drawing out the inherent tension between the soldiers’ casual accounts of looting and violent displacement (coupled with their family members’ muddled and distorted perception of geopolitical realities) and the camera’s deceptively tranquil tableaux of destruction and waste. The result is a document of astonishing discursive power, at once a stark reflection of the Russian imperial project’s callous disregard for civilian lives and a testament to the insidious efficacy of its propaganda machine.