War spoils all it touches and reaches far behind the frontlines to wreak havoc on ordinary people who want only to live their lives in peace.
That’s the central message of Lesia Diak’s sensitive documentary Dad’s Lullaby about a father who returns home to Kyiv after fighting against Russian-backed separatists in the east for three years, only to find that you can take the man out of the war, but not the war out of the man.
New pressures
Serhiy isn’t a bad fellow. Slender and manly, with the ruggedly handsome face you can see anywhere in the Slavic world, he comes home to his wife Nadia and three young sons after serving as an artillery commander. The war has changed him, and although he wants to be back with his family, domestic pressures – and another child on the way – bring new pressures he finds hard to cope with.
Diak, who was drawn to investigating the impact of war on human relations after beginning a relationship with a military medic who had been traumatised by his experiences on the frontlines, started shooting the film in 2018. At that time, the conflict in the so-called ATO (Anti-Terrorist Operation) Zone was a relatively low-level war of skirmishes and artillery duels that still left around 14,000 soldiers and civilians on both sides dead. Sparked by the seizure of Sloviansk in the Donetsk region in April 2014 by militia leader Igor Girkin (currently in jail in Russia after falling foul of Putin), the war was largely fought by volunteers. Serhiy was one of them.
…you can take the man out of the war, but not the war out of the man
Narrative centre
Dad’s Lullaby is more than a fly-on-the-wall study of the difficulties a soldier returning from the horror of war has in re-adapting to civilian life: the director places herself at the centre of the narrative, recording her evening conversations with Serhiy as she attempts to understand just how damaged he is and reveals her own experience of being in a relationship with a man scarred by battle.
«I was responsible for 70 guys. If one of them made a mistake, you’d be bringing him back in a bucket,» Serhiy remarks. He returns time and again to how he was responsible for the lives of these men, of how friends you’d spent every day could be there one second and gone the next. How often have you reflected that it might just as well be you coming home in bloody bits in a bucket?
At first, he seems to enjoy the rough and tumble of family life in their Kyiv apartment, the time he spends with his sons, and the visits to their Dacha — country house — where there is always something to fix up. But he is irritable and snappy, and his relationship with Nadia, by now pregnant, is never particularly loving.
Serhiy seems to be shouldering his responsibilities well, but he swears around the boys and is often grumpy. He does not seem to drink, which is a blessing, but his mind is often elsewhere.
After the birth of his fourth child – a girl – he grows increasingly distant, eventually leaving to live alone, in what he describes as a life inside his own movie, where he can protect himself from the outside world.
He argues with Diak about how one can truly understand a man who has been at war if you don’t have that experience. And he reveals an odd insight into what is effectively his PTSD when he tells her that since returning from the front, he has never had a single dream.
Back to war
We last see Serhiy on camera in 2019; post-production was likely disrupted by first the Covid pandemic and then the launch of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, as a post-script before the credits records that Serhiy returned to fight full-time, and his family joined the millions of Ukrainian refugees, moving to Canada to escape the war.
The director, who herself now lives in exile in Portugal, says that Ukraine’s system for helping those suffering from PTSD remains rudimentary. «The goal of my film is to have the viewer sympathise with each character and forgive. I follow Serhiy’s news on the frontline. His struggles fuel my desire to make the story known and heard,» she states in production notes for the film’s world premiere at the Sarajevo International Film Festival.
