The war in Ukraine has been a spotlight theme at the Berlinale over the last 10 days, featuring in various films, none more remarkable than this rough-edged reportage documentary. A close-up bulletin from the heart of the conflict which feels at times like a real-time video diary, Eastern Front has been purposely scheduled to world premiere on the anniversary of Putin’s barbaric invasion. It marks a fruitful collaboration between two Ukrainian directors, prize-winning festival veteran Vitaly Mansky and Yevhen Titarenko, a young frontline film-maker and member of the “Hospitallers” volunteer medical battalion, who is now on full-time active duty in the war. As a work of cinema, this impressionistic patchwork inevitably feels a little bumpy. But as an unusually unfiltered depiction of the conflict it is an urgent and informative piece of work, a first draft of history. After Berlin it will definitely have wider international traction.
In his former job as head of documentaries for a Russian state TV network, the Lviv-born Mansky once had close access to Putin, even shooting a flattering profile of the future president back at the turn of the millennium, footage that he later revisited with an air of mea culpa in his chilling, prize-winning film Putin’s Witnesses (2018). But since leaving Russia over a decade ago for self-imposed exile in Latvia, the director has become an increasingly vocal critic of Putin’s regime. In 2020, he even staged a surreal one-man protest over the state-sponsored poisoning of opposition politician Alexei Nalvalny, waving underpants outside the notorious Moscow headquarters of the FSB, successor agency to the KGB. Having publicly condemned the invasion of Ukraine many times, he was placed on the wanted list for slander by the Russian Interior Ministry last year.
The raw material of Eastern Front is Titarenko’s first-hand footage of his perilous paramedic duties on the frontline, shot on hand-held and body-mounted cameras, which have an immersive immediacy unlike anything I have yet seen from Ukraine. Often filmed in single unbroken tracking shots, these gripping kinetic sequences include a hair-raising life-or-death ambulance dash to the hospital, weaving through roadblocks and bomb-blasted buildings with a severely injured soldier on board. Other dramatic scenes capture shells exploding just yards away, and sniper bullets whizzing dangerously close, with comrades being killed or injured just out of shot. There are distressing depictions of human suffering here, plus animal victims too. At one point, a jumpy Titarenko shoots a feral dog that attacks him, and is forced to abandon a herd of dying cows that have sunk so deep into a swampy field they cannot be saved. This is not a film for faint-hearted viewers with romanticised ideals about conflict. War is hell for all living creatures.
By contrast, Mansky’s sections of Eastern Front are more discursive, reflective and formally polished. He shoots Titarenko and his fellow paramedic colleagues far away from the conflict, sharing meals with family, attending church christenings for their children, swimming and joking and grieving together. They also find bleak comedy in debating whether to freeze sperm for their wives in case they die in battle. Mansky mostly portrays his fellow Ukrainians as warm and humble, with an ironic sense of humour and complex attitudes towards Russia. Indeed, many have Russian family connections and converse in Russian. As in Mansky’s previous documentary about his hometown of Lviv, Close Relations (2016), his assessment of Russia’s long, tragic history in Ukraine is not some crude propaganda exercise but measured, humane and more than a little heartbroken.
Eastern Front is structured like a piece of music, these pastoral domestic interludes punctuated by loud, chaotic, sense-battering frontline sequences. Some of Titarenko’s scenes looks like a real-life found-footage action thriller or even a single-shooter computer game, the warping effect created by blowing up low-res digital camera material onto a big screen creating an oddly stylised aesthetic, accidental beauty even in the thick of horror. If this disjointed collage film feels like a ragged, open-ended work in progress, that is arguably unavoidable with Putin’s brutal invasion still ongoing. This is not a neat overview of the war, more like an impressively intimate first-hand snapshot of courage, resilience and grace under fire, a heady blast of instant history that is still being shaped right now.
Directors: Vitaly Mansky, Yevhen Titarenko
Screenwriter: Vitaly Mansky
Cinematography: Yevhen Titarenko, Ivan Fomichenko
Editing: Andrey Paperny
Producers: Natalia Manskaia, Nataliia Khazan
Production company: Vertov (Latvia), Braha (Ukraine)
World Sales: Deckert Distribution
Venue: Berlin International Film Festival (Encounters)
In Ukrainian, Russian
98 minutes