The 58th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival certainly did not miss one of the current and ongoing problems. The war in Ukraine was a central concern in at least four documentaries in different festival sections. The most personal has been created by Antonin Peretjatko (*1974, Grenoble, France): Voyage Along the War.
The open form of a diary allows Peretjatko to integrate personal reflections and observations with facts about world politics.
From Paris to Ukraine
His work is an audio-visual diary of his journey from Paris to Ukraine. The voyage has two different motivations. Peretjatko’s grandfather fled to Paris during the purity and hunger waves that Ukraine suffered a hundred years ago. As he wanted to return a decade later, following the deceptive come-back call of Stalin to all Ukrainians, only a lie from his wife, telling him their son felt deeply ill, persuaded him already on the road to return, in this way escaping the prepared gulag. Still, the grandson’s desire to understand more about his family’s culture would motivate him to undertake this risky trip. The other motivation is his neighbour Andrei, a Ukrainian refugee and artist, who wishes to pick up some personal stuff from his hastily vacated apartment in Lviv, near the Polish border.
The open form of a diary allows Peretjatko to integrate personal reflections and observations with facts about world politics. The panorama ranges from comments about plants to interviews with testimonies and individual knowledge. The mostly quite personal baseline of his works contrasts strangely with the director’s dominant, gravity signalising, off-voice commentary, which alludes to Chris Marker and Alain Resnais documentaries.
Present and absent
At the beginning of his voyage, Peretjatko mentioned the refugee camps in the Parisian suburbs. But even before this sequence, he adds archive images of his first voyage to Moscow, where in 2010, he discovers a country with a strong veteran cult, a taste for uniforms, and public decoration, recalling a world that doesn’t exist anymore. His subsequent travel with the Trans-Siberian railway confirms his impression that communism is merely a tacky souvenir.
Crossing the border from a country in peace to one in war feels strange because, near the border, war is present and absent in equal measure. By May 2022, 12 million people had already left their homes, of which five million left the country. The two men entered a new type of war, where the lines between real and virtual are blurred. Soldiers and civilians are killed without ever having even seen the enemy. Peretjatko comments that it is a situation somewhere between Verdun and Star Wars.
Despite accessible digital technologies, the director just uses a 16mm camera to capture only what he can see: the screens of distribution of donated gifts, talks with war victims and testimonies of all kinds, observations like a huge waiting line at petrol stations. A young woman, a poet and musician, confesses that she only expects to find dust and dead plants in her apartment near Kyiv, a place she must abandon. Her promenades in the forest will not be possible anymore because the land is mined. A young man who had lived in the centre of Mariupol during the first days of the occupation doesn’t hide his bitterness and feelings of being abandoned while hearing the radio messages claiming Mariupol will never surrender.
What Peretjatko can’t film, he adds in off voice. From simple facts, one long-range missile costs around one million dollars, the same sum as an anti-ballistic missile. The supply of tanks demands considerable logistics and time – ammunition, equipment, spare parts and training for the soldiers – for minimal results on the ground. This process takes at least four to six months. The military analysis site ORYX, which works with satellite images, stated that after a year of war, Russia had lost almost 1900 tanks, or 50% of its fleet, while on the other side, Ukraine has lost 550 but has captured just as many from Russia.
Crossing the border from a country in peace to one in war feels strange because, near the border, war is present and absent in equal measure.
Views of reality
Other background information concerns rising apartment prices, a poignant demand required from refugees and habitants. As a consequence, there is a mass of crying women and children living on the streets who lost their homes, unable to pay the rent anymore. Meanwhile, from May 2022, the Evangelists already found their place in the city centre to preach. An artist admits his fear of being one of the first targets in case of a Russian occupation. Other intellectuals have already been killed. Like a theatre director, those who survived had burned the archives to destroy any traces.
Peretjatko visits refugee camps and soldiers’ bunkers in civilian house cellars. Finally, he arrived at the place where a Russian tank fleet had been attacked and stopped. There, he filmed houses where the inhabitants were killed on the first day. Many dead bodies lay for days and weeks outside in the frost. Russian soldiers looked for old video recorders, tapes or even food. They were surprised to see apartments with individual bathrooms. This Russian army, staffed with soldiers from Chechnya, Siberia and other distant origins, had been astonished not to be welcomed with flowers but by being attacked. The media reports had disoriented them completely.
Peretjatko finally abandoned his idea of looking for traces of his grandfather’s original places. Even before the war, too many villages had disappeared due to social transformations. On his way back, he remarked on a 16-kilometer line of cars waiting to enter the country, which was at war.
Partly, Peretjatko underlines his images with mostly classical music sequences, avoiding sentimental inputs. Even if his work doesn’t lead to new discoveries, his diary gives the spectator an intense view of a reality that often overpasses imaginations, especially in the individually suffered aspects of war.
