Intercepted: A documentary by Oksana Karpovych

The film and its production process

Intercepted (2024), the second full-length documentary by the Ukrainian-Canadian filmmaker Oksana Karpovych, was shown in preview in Paris on 24 September 2024, in the presence of the author and the French part of the crew. The title of the film refers to excerpts of phone conversations of Russian soldiers in Ukraine deployed in the initial months of the Russian invasion in Ukraine (between March and November 2022). Hacked by the Ukrainian Security Services and distributed online, most of the soldiers’ conversations are with their families and friends back home—mostly women. Working on this non-fiction film, Karpovych carefully whittled down thirty-one hours of this “audio archive-of-the-damned” (nod to David Katz). Although the filmmaker prioritizes audio material over visual in Intercepted, using the procedure of contrast or counterpoint (see Josh Lustig, Anton Doline)—which consists of combining two parallel realities of the war, audio and visual—she deliberately provokes cognitive dissonance in the audience. As Karpovych explains in her interviews (Voice of America, ARTE, Shpalta Media), this is the same effect as what was actually occurring and inspired the origin of the film. Indeed, this device, intelligent and powerful in its simplicity, juxtaposes the fragments of prosaic, intimate, and even-tempered conversations between Russians with images of sheer destruction (taken by Christopher Nunn), that the same persons as those talking have inflicted on civilian Ukrainians. “Anxiety-building silences, washes of electronic music, and more everyday sounds like birdsong […] accentuate both the ordinariness and extraordinariness of what is unfolding onscreen,” writes The New York Times journalist Manohla Dargis. The ordinariness of the Russian people speaking offscreen—in heart-to-heart chit-chat, wrapped in a comfortable aura of familial intimacy—alongside the extraordinariness of the war crimes these people have committed, are dispassionately described by the soldiers and shown indirectly on the screen. In a way, all the conversations in this film fuse to form a collective portrait of Russians, monstrous in its banality, while all the images coalesce to illustrate the anthropological catastrophe caused by these ordinary Russians in Ukraine.^[1]

Take this example of a banal conversation about a pair of blue New Balance sneakers, size 38, looted from an apartment hastily abandoned by a Ukrainian family fleeing the invaders, or maybe killed. We are listening while watching images of a house with a huge hole in its wall, windows and furniture broken, and a carton of eggs left on a kitchen table, hinting at an unfinished breakfast. “They will be just right for Sofia,” confirms the wife of the Russian soldier on the other end of the call, with a heedful tenderness in her voice. “What a good person I am married to, a thrifty one! You bring everything home! Sofia will be starting high school this year, she will need a laptop too. Take everything you can,” exhorts the woman with touching concern, while the camera slowly moves down the street of a Ukrainian village (deliberately unidentified), with destroyed houses that were renovated just before the invasion, hungry abandoned domestic animals roaming around, and people congregating to receive some humanitarian aid (or because they have nowhere to go now).

To the ominous advance of a Russian tank along dirt and paved roads, shot from high atop a vehicle and accompanied by an eerie subterranean sound, Karpovych contrasts the immediate cleaning of debris by Ukrainians after each devastating attack on apartment blocks, municipal buildings, schools, libraries, and hospitals: back-hoes and brooms against tank and missiles. The unjustified violence of the Russian soldiers meets the serene resilience of Ukrainian civilians, as they routinely continue to do domestic chores: a woman sweeping up shattered glass, a man cutting ripe grapes, a group of men methodically taking apart a fallen plane. The images of children playing outside in the opening scene of the film, a couple of bikes on the grass, chalk marks on the road, lush and green trees—all denoting insouciance, tranquility, and ordinary life, life tout court, despite the heavy atmosphere of waiting for some approaching woe (an empty country road stretching down the middle of the shot)—are counterbalanced by the final sequence, showing Russian prisoners of war, wounded or mutilated, all in grey, in a place of detainment. They are queuing up for food or lying in beds, epitomizing an immobile doom, an exact image of their country; Russian pleonexia, an insatiable desire of having more, turned into a forced sobriety, like the old lady from the Russian folk tale about the Golden Fish. What are they thinking about? Are they thinking? No need to interview them: they have spoken enough throughout the film, telling us a lot about their own mentality and culture, as they recounted their “meetings” with Ukraine and the Ukrainians, mostly for the first time in their lives. 

Ukrainians are not Russians

Oksana Karpovych is a graduate of the Department of Cultural Studies at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and of the film school at Concordia University in Montreal. These two backgrounds are joined in Intercepted, as filmmaking leads her to a deeper cultural and philosophical reflection on fundamental causes and nature of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Indeed, as David Katz rightly observes, Karpovych depicts the war in “a deferred, oblique manner: it’s the finger on the trigger, and then the dissipating smoke, with the explosion itself erased,” short-circuiting the spectators’ passions in order to prompt questions. The counterpoint cinematographic device thus turns out to be a stepping-stone to a deeper inquiry. Watching the static images of the destruction, we are led to focus our attention on the content of the informal chats of Russian soldiers with their interlocutors, feeling embarrassed when we become aware of the contrast between the apparent vacuity of these candid conversations and the scale of the war crimes and the depth of human tragedy they caused in Ukraine. When the Russian soldiers speak of Ukrainians, especially in terms of the differences that they perceive once they’ve invaded, a whole range of feelings comes to the surface: hate, bitterness, jealousy, distance, and sometimes admiration.

“They literally live in their fields [i.e., hard-working], not like us”; “They have a lot of livestock, not like us”; “They are tougher than fascists, these banderovtsy [followers of Ukrainian nationalist leader Bandera]”; “I tell you, they live better here than we do, everything is good quality. Russia is a voracious country”; “Every household has a cellar full of canned food,” say the Russian “liberators.” “Mom, I enjoyed torturing so much! I can tell you what tortures I learned about and participated in”—and then he proceeds to do so.

“Synok [laddie], it’s normal. I would also get a kick out of it, torturing those bastards, khokhol spawn, if I was there. How could it be otherwise, sladenkiy moy [my sweetie]?”—the soldier’s mother flatters and approves of the sadistic joys of her son. “Finish killing all the Ukrainians and hurry home, papulia [daddykins],” another soldier’s daughter beseeches him lovingly. “I stole some things. Everybody did.” “What Russian wouldn’t? Goods welcome from Ukraine,” assents a feminine voice, laughing at her own wordplay. “I’m just killing Nazis. Yesterday we were out for a walk, a woman with two children came towards us—well, we put them down…It’s only proper, they are our enemies…Right, I don’t feel sorry for them. It’s their choice. They could have left, like the others did.” “Roast them khokhols on a spit, zayka [bunny dear],” says his enabler supportively. 

In these conversations, the interlocutors from Russia—mothers, wives, daughters, girlfriends—reveal themselves to be even more violent than the occupiers, who are often conscripts from poor, remote regions and from prisons; we expect the soldiers to be ruthless, depraved, and debased, but sometimes they show more understanding and even empathy. The loving voices of these women ask their men to kill more and return home as soon as possible; they wish death on the Ukrainians and ask that the children not be spared. Their “spoken” violence, paradoxically inflated by distance, reveals the deleterious effects of Russian state propaganda on the minds of Russian citizens (military as well as civilians) and pinpoints the underlying motivation of Russia’s war against Ukraine: its lust for imperial domination. “Mum, what are we doing in Ukraine?! People were living here, and now we’ve covered the country with corpses. Why?!” “Don’t you dare say that. They are not people at all. Keep fighting.” No wonder that the citizens of distant Western countries, like a French viewer in dialogue with the filmmaker after the screening, doubt the authenticity of these conversations—inconceivable in their detached cruelty and unprovoked violence—and even suspect them of being Ukrainian propaganda that demonizes the enemy.

Lucid voices of “another Russia” (cf. anderes Deutschland or “another Germany”—yet another Russian “borrowing”) are extremely rare in the film: perhaps four or five in the whole range of content (76 fragments composing the film, selected from the initial nine hundred conversations). A soldier begging his family not to believe the lies on the TV (particularly about NATO bases in Ukraine); a woman mentioning the scale of corruption and state lies in Russia (the death certificates of all the men in the village who were killed in Ukraine indicate a heart attack as the cause of death, thus depriving surviving family of benefits); a former partner, taking the blame for the war crimes committed by the Russian army in Ukraine, the manipulative power of the propaganda, and even (!) the collective responsibility of all Russians for the war of terror their country is waging against Ukraine: “We chose this, by being silent,” says one single voice in nine hundred.

The “enigmatic Russian soul”: breaking the code

Letting ordinary Russians speak for themselves, Oksana Karpovych’s film skilfully leads us to see the contradictions and absurdity of the ready-made formulaic language of Russian propaganda (or of the Russian “opposition”, or of Russophiles around the world), often thoughtlessly re-transmitted by Western journalists. Thus, what we hear in the film is not just Putin speaking; it is clearly not just “Putin’s war,” as the so-called Russian opposition tries to convince us. Neither is the propaganda language spoken by a “brotherly people” pervaded with the “great Russian culture”—even if the dialogues we hear do tell us something about the mysterious “Russian soul” (dusha), revealing itself as a “receptacle of violence” and perversion (see Oksana Karpovych).

“Alyosha, is it true that at Easter the Jews steal a child and kill it?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s a book here in which I read about the trial of a Jew, who took a child of four years old and cut off the fingers from both hands, and then crucified him on the wall, hammered nails into him and crucified him, and afterwards, when he was tried, he said that the child died soon, within four hours. That was ‘soon’! He said the child moaned, kept on moaning and he stood admiring it. That’s nice!”

“Nice?”

“Nice; I sometimes imagine that it was I who crucified him. He would hang there moaning and I would sit opposite him eating pineapple compote. I am awfully fond of pineapple compote. Do you like it?” (F. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov).

In fact, the untranslatable Russian word dushka is probably more appropriate to describe Russians: it literary means “little soul,” but can also be an affectionate term for “a pleasant, nice person.” Like the “pineapple compote” in Lisa Khokhlakova’s provocative story above (referring to the Russian anti-semitic propaganda addressed to the unconscious Russian people: see Zborovska 2006, 167), the Russians we hear in the film Intercepted recount their crimes with some kind of blithe frankness, peppering their speech with affectionate words or diminutives (synok, sladenkiy moy, papulia, zayka), considering war to be just a job, a way of gaining money to have a better—i.e., in their understanding, more comfortable—life on returning home: to be able to pay their mortgage, renovate their flat, buy a car. To listen to them speaking without regard to content, whether absurdly banal or outrageously violent, they almost seem to be nice guys, dushkas from Jos Stelling’s eponymous movie (Dushka, 2007). “Peaceful people” (an approximate translation of the Ukrainian title of the film), as it were, behind the apparent normality hiding an inexhaustible capacity of nuisance and a profound vileness.

The Russians…were a horde conscious of its inferiority in a wordless, deaf sort of way that goaded them to any-and-all licentiousness, raping 80-year old grannies, dishing out death indifferently, superficially, in passing; demolishing, wrecking, destroying all signs of prosperity, order, and civilizational wealth, while displaying in the disinterestedness of this destruction a high measure of Inventiveness, Initiative, Attention, Concentration, Intensity of Will…

This is an excerpt from Stanisław Łem’s letter (dated 6 May 1977), written in Berlin to his principal American translator Michael Kandel, in which he shares his reading of the moment: the personal memoirs of a German physician who witnessed the deeds of the Soviet Army in Germany after Hitler’s defeat in 1945 (S. Lem, Selected Letters to Michael Kandel, 2014, p. 142–143). A woman of Czech origin living in France for decades, who was among the viewers of Intercepted in Paris, also testified that the film vividly brought to her mind painful souvenirs of the Russian soldiers in Prague in 1968. Contrary to the Frenchman mentioned above, she did not doubt the authenticity of the dialogues in the documentary.

Woven together, the images and conversations in the film do not merely document the disasters of Russia’s war against Ukraine and reveal the total dehumanization of Russian society, expressed through intimate family chats; they invite us to reflect. Oksana Karpovych wants us to comprehend the deeper cause beneath the violent words and acts of ordinary Russians: their imperialistic worldview and lust for domination (closely connected, according to Nila Zborovska, with a sadistic sexual instinct; 2006, 169). It is as if the violence of the Russian state machine has burst, like a cluster bomb, into a myriad of individual violences on the part of ordinary men, women, and children, particularly toward Ukrainians, who are envisaged as objects to loot, rape, torture, or kill. “Our historical pastime is the direct satisfaction of inflicting pain. There are lines in Nekrassov describing how a peasant whips a horse on the eyes, ‘on its meek eyes’; everyone must have seen it. It’s peculiarly Russian,” says the most intellectual and solid of the Karamazovs, Ivan (who paradoxically turns in the course of the story from a civilized man into a Karamazov-like, hysterical “unformed raw material of Destiny”; see H. Hesse, “The Brothers Karamazov or The Downfall of Europe,” 1920). And we should listen to him—to them—thoughtfully, as Oksana Karpovych did, to better know how to act in response.

[1] For this reason, in what follows, the audio/video synchronization is not quite exact.