A frontline paramedic volunteer in eastern Ukraine who has made a documentary about the gruesome everyday reality of his battalion’s work has said he wanted to offer an uncensored view from the heart of the conflict in order to “wake up the world”.
A Means To Tell The Truth
Yevhen Titarenko, a film director who has been part of a volunteer medical battalion, the Hospitallers, since 2014, said viewers may find his film Shidney Front (Eastern Front) hard to watch but he believed it was a necessary means to tell the truth. “The TV news is comparatively easy on the eye but this means people are not aware of how it really is,” he said. “Some people say there are scenes in our film that are too disturbing to view. I say maybe it’s about time people looked more closely at what’s going on.”
Titarenko has collaborated with the veteran Russian film director Vitaly Mansky, best known for films such as Under the Sun and Putin’s Witnesses, who has spoken out against the Russian invasion of Ukraine and has been placed on a Kremlin wanted list for slander. Mansky’s experienced eye helped to shape the film so that it appealed to a wider audience, Titarenko said. Much of the film, shown at the Berlinale, depicts medics crisscrossing battlefields, through trenches and cratered forests, recording close up their hair-raising scrambles in a former British army Snatch vehicle or on foot, to save wounded soldiers while trying not to get hit themselves by the enemy shells raining down around them.
Rare Moments Of Companionship
Medics enjoy rare moments of companionship and love with friends and family in bucolic settings, by a lakeside and at a summer banquet in a field in western Ukraine where they celebrate the baptism of one of their sons. In one scene, a hairdresser refuses payment for a cut, telling the medic: “When you come back, we’ll drink to peace.” “We felt it was very important to do this to get the message across that we don’t want this war but we are fighting Russia on behalf of the civilized world,” said the film’s producer, Nataliia Khazan “We’re tired, we’ve already endured nine years of this,” she added, referring to Russia’s invasion and annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014.
Titarenko, 34, who once worked as a fixer for the Guardian in Ukraine, said the contrast between life on the eastern front and the glitz of the Berlin film festival felt bizarre. “The world can’t just stop, festivals have to continue, but I think to myself at the same time: the parade of chauffeur-driven cars, the beautifully made-up women strolling on the red carpet…” he said.
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Source: Theguardian
