THE STORY – A journey through Ukraine that reveals the banality of evil behind the Russian invasion with the shocking juxtaposition of two realities: the Ukrainians who have been suffering and resisting the war violence, and the Russian military and civilians who have been perpetrating it.
THE CAST – N/A
THE TEAM – Oksana Karpovych (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 95 Minutes
Considering the form that the startling, urgent documentary “Intercepted” takes, it’s a wonder that director Oksana Karpovych began the project by feeling incapable of capturing images. In addition to being a filmmaker, she’s also a photographer, yet she found herself “in a strange state where I really could not take any images. I can only compare it to being speechless: this was imageless.” When she and I spoke earlier this year after her film screened at Film at Lincoln Center’s 53rd edition of its New Directors/New Films showcase, she noted that no image can properly convey “the state of shock, pain, and terror” that she experienced while filming Ukraine during wartime. “There was so much media attention everywhere, but I could feel that the images being produced in such big quantities were all the same,” Karpovych said. “They were not grasping the most important things, the nuances that I felt myself.”
Those nuanced images are what “Intercepted” is made up of entirely: Video of a distressed nation under attack by Russian armed forces, with intercepted phone calls between Russian soldiers and their loved ones serving as the film’s soundtrack. These conversations – some stunned, some cold-blooded – are practically the only thing heard throughout the doc’s runtime, aside from natural sounds of the surrounding atmosphere, like a car’s wheels as they drive along dirt roads or sirens announcing the arrival of imminent danger to the remaining dwellers of a rundown city. The joyous sight of children dangling from a tire swing quickly becomes a gloomy reminder that happiness cannot last in an environment of this sort; anyone who makes it five minutes into “Intercepted” will immediately understand why Karpovych told my audience, “I wish I could wish you a pleasant screening, but instead, I’ll wish you a thoughtful one.”
The film’s grave nature is unrelenting, making it a much more vital document. Perhaps it sounds a bit on the nose, even manipulative, to pair the twisted exchanges between Russian militants and their families with images of the destruction they’ve directly caused, but what else would you want to see? That is, if you want to see any of it at all – which is precisely the point, and something another 2024 film presents from the opposite side. At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, the documentary “Russians at War,” a first-person film that tells the story of the ongoing war from within the Russian troops, came under fire for the assumption (and confusion) that it was a piece of Putin propaganda. Anastasia Trofimova, the film’s Russian-Canadian director, described it as a warts-and-all portrayal that showed the “human face” of the soldiers involved. TIFF organizers initially postponed screenings of the film before rescheduling them, noting that they would not “surrender to pressure.” Regardless, those who opposed the film argued that the human faces that deserved to be seen were not that of Russian soldiers, but of Ukrainian victims.
In a way, Karpovych blends the two with “Intercepted.” As the film goes on, it seems like the phone calls between Russian soldiers and their loved ones are getting progressively darker. On one call, we hear a man tell another, “Our guys shot a mother right in front of her two children,” to which the person on the other end of the line says, “Who cares? She’s still the enemy.” Later, someone tells a loved one, “I no longer have pity… They chose to stay [when] they had the option to leave.” But then comes the film’s final two conversations, one where a soldier accepts his inevitable death, pleading to his wife not to let their child be recruited to the army, while the other features a soldier trying to calm his family as he describes someone who is gravely injured. Karpovych told me that she wanted to show the desperation from both sides of the war: Ukraine through footage and Russia through audio.
Her fundamental principle while filming was that there was (and is) “no good outcome for anyone in this war. I discovered that these soldiers were living out this journey,” she said. “At first, they would arrive in Ukraine excited and feeling powerful. But, very quickly, once they discovered the brutality of war and the Ukrainian resistance, they were going through a big dissolution.” She added that Russian soldiers were forced to face a disappointing truth – that no matter what they did, they were unlikely to make it out of Ukraine or back to their families alive – and that while sharing this truth with their relatives, they received a lack of understanding in return. “They were risking their own lives, but also feeling that they were lied to and manipulated.”
In a structural sense, “Intercepted” is not unlike another one of this year’s finest films, “No Other Land,” except for the latter’s justifiable refusal to warrant the opposition any space for redemption. This is not to say that Karpovych believes or does not believe that Russian soldiers deserve forgiveness for their actions, but that their motives are ambiguous, even if such complexity is only realized in the aftermath of horrifying misdeeds. She’s also cognizant of how powerful an influence propaganda — the military’s version of peer pressure — can be and that it has a definite impact. “We all know that violence itself is dehumanizing whenever it’s happening in any war,” she told me.” But what struck me with this material is that I believe the Russian propaganda is even more dehumanizing than the war itself.”
“Sides“ aside — they matter, but independently of the film’s existence — “Intercepted“ begs to be seen for how harrowing it is, not as a form of entertainment. Not all movies can achieve that distinction, and frankly, not all of them should. “No Other Land” doesn’t offer any tears of joy; “Russians at War“ is an exercise in discomfort; perhaps “Intercepted’s” most one-to-one comparison, “20 Days in Mariupol,“ was as disconcerting a documentary as any to be released during this wartime period, and went on to win last year’s Best Documentary Feature Oscar. Whether or not “Intercepted“ becomes widely seen enough to savor a similar fate is beside the point. The point is it is being seen at all, and the faces within it are not being ignored. As one Ukrainian woman tells Karpovych and her crew midway through the film, “Thank you for not forgetting about us.“ After “Intercepted,“ forgetting is far from possible and less so an option.
