Russia’s brutal assault on Ukraine began long before the full-scale invasion of 2022. As documentary director Lesia Diak confirms with Dad’s Lullaby, the country’s easterly border regions have been at war with Putin’s armed militias for the last decade, causing untold damage not just physically but also emotionally and psychologically, with knock-on effect both on military personnel and their loved ones at home. Diak’s modestly scaled debut feature is a close-up study of one Kyiv family struggling to process this trauma.
Filmed in 2018 and 2019, Dad’s Lullaby could be seen as old news or, alternatively, as a prescient and increasingly timely insight into Ukraine’s shattered psyche. Domestic in focus, this is one of the more intimate films to emerge from the ongoing war on Europe’s eastern front. It feels slight and scrappy in places, with a hand-held DIY rawness, and promising hints of Diak’s own story that fizzle out too soon. But as a tender exercise in cinema as family therapy session, it is frequently engaging and insightful. It world premieres this week in competition at Sarajevo Film Festival, where it won the work-in-progress Docu Talent award in 2022.
Shot in classic no-budget hand-held observational style, Dad’s Lullaby instantly plunges viewers into the cramped Kyiv apartment of Serhiy Zinchuk, his wife Nadiia, and their three young sons Nikita, Artem and Sasha. The subject matter here is mostly low-key and domestic: family meals, walks in the park, father-son friction, the routine tensions of five people sharing a small home. But the unseen disruptive energy behind every scene is Serhiy’s recent battlefield experience fighting Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine.
Ever since, Serhiy has struggled to readjust to his normal duties as father and husband. Food has lost all taste, and he craves solitude from his family, feeling increasingly alienated from them despite his obviously warm paternal bond. He is also haunted by the real-life nightmares he witnessed in combat, the bloodlust and casual slaughter, and the existential horror of seeing former comrades blown to pieces. “You come back mentally broken,” he tells Diak, “there is a total mess in your head.”
Shooting sporadically over more than a year, Diak tracks the corrosive effect that Serhiy’s battle-scarred state has on his family: his withdrawn moods, his angry outbursts, his increasingly frosty relationship with Nadiia. When she becomes pregnant with their first daughter, it is an outwardly happy event, but their arguments continue even during the christening. Some kind of serious family fracture becomes inevitable.
Dad’s Lullaby takes an intriguing sideways swerve when Serhiy turns the tables on Dias during their private therapy sessions, picking up the camera to interrogating her feelings and life choices, notably her failed relationship with another soldier, who worked as a medic on the frontline. Amusingly, he also questions her directing decisions, arguing that her footage could equally be edited into a paean to family love or portrait of a domestic tyrant. “We can’t build our lives out of fragments,” he protests. Everyone’s a film critic nowadays.
Under different circumstances, Serhiy could appear controlling and mansplaining in scenes like these. But he is sensitive, self-aware and self-critical enough to give his insights authority. Trained as a psychologist and social worker, he appears to view making this film as a means to try and understand his own fragile mental state. A documentary in which the subject becomes co-director midway through is a thrilling idea, challenging conventional notions of authorial voice or journalistic neutrality. So it is a shame Diak does not pursue this fertile sideline further, digging deeper into the parallels between her emotional scars and Serhiy’s .
Because filming wrapped in 2019, Dad’s Lullaby is only tangentially about the current war in Ukraine. A brief coda during the final credits informs us that, after Russia invaded in 2022, Serhiy returned to the frontline, and is still fighting today. Nadiia and their children have since relocated abroad for their own safety. Likewise Diak, who is now based in Portugal. This is where her film bites hardest, switching from personal to universal: the cycle of trauma depicted here is now a daily reality, for thousands more families just like this one.
Director: Lesia Diak
Cinematography: Lesia Diak, Serhiy Zinchuk
Editing: Andrei Gorgan
Music: Margaryta Kulichova
Producers: Lesia Diak, Monica Lazurean-Gorgan, Elena Martin
Production companies: DramaFree (Ukraine), FilmWays (Romania), Petnaesta Umjetnost (Croatia)
World sales: DramaFree
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Documentary Feature Competition)
In Ukrainian
78 minutes