30/06/2024 - Oleh Sentsov’s record of the Russo-Ukrainian war, shot in the trenches themselves, is a compelling piece of “accidental” filmmaking

This film by Ukrainian director, soldier and activist Oleh Sentsov has passed through numerous barriers to even exist. Amidst a live combat zone in southeastern Ukraine last June, he paused to adjust his helmet, only to accidentally switch on an affixed GoPro rig (and for all his candid pre-premiere interviews in The Guardian, Variety et al, there’s been little explanation of his intended filmmaking plans whilst deployed). The camera itself caught around 90 minutes of revealing, raw footage before its battery expired; he later chanced upon it in his file library and debated deleting it. But praise be it’s intact, and we have Real [+see also:
interview: Oleh Sentsov
film profile], with its unbroken but dynamic visuals capturing a gradual narrative arc, world-premiering this weekend as a Karlovy Vary Special Screening.

With its visual point of view consigned to the trenches, and Sentsov’s own head an unwitting camera tripod panning occasionally to his company of soldiers, Real depicts an archetypal event on the frontlines of the war with Russia, showing the unsteady but crucial balance of the Ukrainian forces’ resilience and organisation, contrasted by how their finite military power keeps them and their enemy neutralising each other, with overall ground never ceded.

The name “Real” refers to the part of the Zaporizhzhia region where we see a small portion of territory being contested, with the Ukrainian army seeking to make a gradual gain eastwards. Sentsov, known in the subtitles by his evocative call name “Grunt”, is for dramatic purposes a go-between funnelling orders from the high command to the soldiers he’s responsible for, in addition to communicating with a more vulnerable patrol outside our visual purview. Our comprehension is solely aided by the subtitling of Sentsov’s ongoing radio comms; we’re sensitised to his eyes scanning the claustrophobic but well-hidden trench, and especially his ears, the overlapping voices strategising in tandem, but never losing their cool or professionalism. Additional sound design was provided later, to no detriment to the film’s vivid sense of realism, its silences equally ominous as the intensifying crescendos of missile fire.

The coded names and idioms also remind us we’re in a world bound by its own rules and new forms of language: beyond military jargon that has an almost-exotic impenetrability, we can smirk a bit as we realise various areas have been named after European football teams: “Marseille”, our subterranean pit that Sentsov’s camera can never see beyond, with “Chelsea” and “Barcelona” nearby and vulnerable. The English subtitles also imply there are direct Ukrainian correlates for “clusterfuck” and “fuckity-fuck”; the continually rolling take captures peril, of course, but also the sardonic reactions and bathos we all use to process crises.

In these 90 minutes – repetitive viewing towards the middle, but necessarily immersive given the privilege of the audience’s comfortable distance from the fighting – Sentsov has managed to pinpoint a military operation pragmatically changing course, where demands for ammo reinforcements are superseded by an evacuation plan, marked by the clamour on the radio to “get us out!”. A closing title card confirms this proceeded, despite a number of casualties; Sentsov’s instincts and bravery, even if he never intended to show them publicly, have brought us further into the fulcrum of this war than many deliberately made documentaries, conveying the power and resilience Ukraine still has, yet also the fine margins by which it can count for nothing.

Real is a co-production by Ukraine and Croatia, staged by Arthouse Traffic and Cry Cinema, in cooperation with Propeler Film and Downey Ink.