Barbara Wurm: Oksana, we know you as a writer of essays. We know that immediately after February 24, 2022, you worked in Ukraine as a local producer. What made you decide to make the film?
Oksana Karpovych: It was quite a journey. I was in Ukraine when the full-scale invasion started. At first, as with most people in Ukraine, I was very lost and overwhelmed. But what I knew for sure is that I wanted to stay as long as I could and witness what was going to happen. Later I realized that simply being there is not enough. Because I happen to be a documentary filmmaker, I really needed to do something more than just be present and help my family. And then, by coincidence, I started working with Al Jazeera English reporters. In my team I was lucky to have Imran Khan, an amazing journalist, and Saad Abedine, an amazing producer, both very experienced. I went to many different places with them, mostly in and around Kyiv, but we also traveled to other regions. We documented and reported about all sorts of Russian war crimes.
This role of a local producer was very new to me. Usually as an artist, I like to talk to people. I love collecting stories and I connect easily with different types of people. But in the role of a producer, I often spent time not talking to anyone and simply observing, waiting hours for my crew to do the live reporting. And this put me in a very interesting situation that actually inspired the film. At night, after work, I developed a habit of listening to the intercepted phone calls of the Russian soldiers that the Ukrainian security services were publishing online on a regular basis. This was causing a crazy cognitive dissonance, because the contrast of what I was experiencing during the day and what I was hearing at night was completely absurd. This awareness basically informed an idea for INTERCEPTED. It's very simple, a juxtaposition of two realities: the reality of Ukrainians who are experiencing the war as survivors, and the reality of the Russians who are perpetrating it.
IB: Could you specify when the footage was shot, and from which period the recordings come from? When was the first time you encountered these recordings? To a non-Ukrainian audience this whole phenomenon might be quite unusual.
OK: The Ukrainian government was publishing these phone calls even years earlier, after the invasion of 2014. There were just not as many, and they were not disseminated as widely. Right after the full-scale invasion they became quite popular for a while. They were shocking, and it was really interesting to listen to them. For the film, I worked with the material that was intercepted and posted between early March and late October 2022. I decided at the very beginning to create a limit for myself because otherwise collecting this material could have gone on forever.
BW: Where do these recordings come from? Is there an archive? How did you get access to them?
OK: Most of them are available on YouTube channels hosted by the Ukrainian security services. Basically, anyone can listen to them. However, they are mostly in Russian and only some of them have English subtitles. I think the primary audience is actually Russians. I didn't have the privilege to interview the Ukrainian security services to find out, but I believe that the main goal was to tell the Russian population the truth about the invasion, to prevent them as much as possible from joining the army and going to Ukraine. In the very beginning, I wanted to get access to the unpublished phone calls. But it was not possible. So we simply decided to use the ones that were available publicly. At first I didn’t believe that it would be possible to make a feature length film with only that material. But after I listened to all of it, I realized that we could have made multiple.
BW: The concept seems simple, but at the same time, it’s fascinating how it leads to such a tremendous complexity, emotionally as well as psychologically. It really goes beyond reasoning. What were the principles of choosing and arranging the dialogues?
OK: From the very beginning, I was more interested in the conversations of the Russian soldiers with their mothers, wives, sisters or girlfriends, I found them more intimate. I felt that the men opened up more to the women. And at the same time, the women seemed way more cruel than the men. So initially, I even thought about focusing only on women. Eventually, the editor, Charlotte Tourres, and I decided not to restrict ourselves, because we also wanted to tell a story that has a beginning and an end. The starting point was the beginning of the invasion, while we were still not sure about the ending, the editing process was an exploration. I also wanted to reconstruct the experience of Russian occupants in Ukraine. One of the things that inspired me to think of the film as a journey was that very often the Russian invaders spoke of Ukraine as a country they were visiting. As if they came as tourists. They were fascinated by the nature, the food, the culture, things that they had discovered, things that any of us gets fascinated by when we visit foreign countries. I travel a lot and could relate to that. Of course, it was also shocking. So those two aspects were key: women and stories that helped us to build the chronology of the journey.
IB: Anyone who knows these recordings knows that there are much more cruel examples, you could have easily chosen only these ones, where you get very brutal descriptions, and yet you chose to show this journey as a human one. And you have a clear dramaturgy in the audio, and parallel to that, you have a dramaturgy in the images as well. Could you tell us a bit about your notion of humans as such, inhabiting and invading these spaces?
OK: This cognitive dissonance that I mentioned also derives from the fact that the Russian invaders are humans, as anyone else, yet what they do is inhumane. I think that was what I found most shocking and painful to accept. To share and underline the inhumanity, I needed to show the humanity. It also refers to the previous question of how I selected the intercepts. I was curious and looked for conversations about everyday routine that were showing the Russian soldiers as ordinary people, that any of us anywhere in the world could relate to. I think that from the very beginning, I realized that this can really help us to emphasize the inhumanity, and all stages of degradation these people experience. Regarding the visual journey, this was trickier, because when we were shooting the film, as today, there was an active war going on. So we never knew what we would be filming, we couldn’t make any clear plans – I had only a vague idea of where I wanted to go. Rule number one was to avoid shocking or graphic images. We wanted to avoid showing shelling or combat operations, because that’s something that people see in the news all the time. My team believes that it’s not necessarily something that can help understanding the experience of war. War is also a lot about silence and waiting, and this horrible sense of time being suspended. That's what we tried to recreate by going to seemingly quiet places where we could stay longer, with our camera on a tripod, where we didn't need to run around trying to capture images. The film is also constructed as a geographical journey, it is a movement through Ukraine. We move from region to region; we follow the invasion chronologically, and the de-occupation of some of the Ukrainian regions that had been occupied earlier. There is some logic in that movement, but it's quite complex.
BW: How can we imagine the process of filming? In a way you transform this journey into a cinematic liberation. There is at once the military operation by the Ukrainian army, and then there is your cinematic operation.
OK: I don't really know how to answer. I knew that somehow I was very drawn to Kharkiv and the Kharkiv region. And I knew that even though I didn’t want to show graphic images, I wanted to show the struggle of people who live in the war red zones and who experience shelling and bombing. I didn't want to have it on screen, but I wanted to be in places where the war was very active and show the aftermath of the attacks. When we started shooting the film, the Kyiv region was already liberated. We filmed a bit in the Kyiv region and then decided to go to the Kharkiv region, and we filmed in Kharkiv shortly before the region was liberated. Afterwards we also went to the south of Ukraine, because the war was very active in and around Mykolaiv. Then we returned to Kharkiv right after the region was de-occupied by the Ukrainian forces. It was very intuitive. Of course, I was following the news all the time, but I was also taking care of the safety of our crew as much as possible. We tried to avoid getting too close to the frontline, because we knew that it was possible to make this film without taking extreme risks.
IB: Why did you want to avoid showing the graphic images?
OK: I just believe that graphic images are not helpful to the cause. This question has been widely discussed, in books and elsewhere. How much does it help us to see the pain of others and images of violence? Sometimes it is important to see them as proof. But sometimes it's also important to reflect on war through other ways. Also, showing blood and torn bodies is not my style. I think the film we made is still brutal, but that brutality is coming from a different place. It makes me emotional speaking about this – it's really not easy. As a Ukrainian, as a human, I experienced the war before I started filming it. And even though consciously, I'm very aware of the choices that we made in the film, on the other hand I saw an enormous amount of violence and war crimes. And, of course, it brings me so much pain to bear those memories with me, that trauma. But still, I look for approaches that are more efficient to share that experience with other people than just showing it directly. Since the very beginning of the invasion, since late February 2022, there has been a sense that what we are seeing is a historical event. It's something that is changing us and the world forever.
BW: So in a way, it is a reproduction of a historical moment. But the images and your choices are surprising in 2024, despite the fact that we’ve already seen so much footage of destroyed places in Ukraine. I think now is a very critical moment politically – we are dealing with the normalization of the war and we are not perceiving it as an imminent threat anymore. The images you chose pulled me out of this normalization and made me review my own perception. Also, there is a lot of hope in this film. There is a clash between sound and image, but in the end they come together and there is a victory. Yet unfortunately, at the moment we are not as close to that victory as we expected to be when you shot the film. Did you follow that trajectory back then, expecting that at some point it would reach an end or its objective?
OK: I'm very happy to hear that this film is not just another depressing documentation of the war, that there is some optimism or hope. That actually was my intention. We also tried to focus on the resilience of Ukrainians, and it made us choose certain situations or places. We wanted to show that in these horrible circumstances, people do something that is incredible. They actively resist as much as they can, trying to maintain the normality in this complete abnormality. I think it's beautiful and it's touching, and it's a source of inspiration and strength for me to see how people who remain in Ukraine keep doing that.
BW: Your film might work differently for a non-Ukrainian viewer who isn’t especially familiar with the context than for Ukrainian audiences, and even more so for people who went through the war themselves. Did you have test viewings to understand whether this is working with a wider audience, or did you just trust your own instincts?
OK: I mostly trusted myself and my team. We didn't have test screenings, but we went to different forums and workshops. Along the process of making the film we were fortunate to present our work-in-progress and the idea to different audiences, mostly professionals, from all over the world. And their feedback made us more and more confident in what we were doing. Of course, I think people who understand the Russian language can grasp more nuances than foreign audiences. And I think these phone calls are far more painful to listen to for those who actually experienced this war. But in general, everyone seems to feel that it is very interesting material.
IB: It is also remarkable because you take sound and image recorded at a certain moment, for documentary reasons, to serve a certain function. Yet, in your film, it goes beyond this function, it becomes more than a document. You also use it in an empowering way, by reclaiming these Russian voices you reclaim and own the narrative that otherwise would have been defined by the invaders. But your film also conveys meanings that are not restricted to a Ukrainian reality. Did you also have a foreign audience in mind? After two years of full-scale war, do you feel there is something more, or something different, that needs to be said?
OK: I'm pretty happy with the film, and the moment it is being released. While working on the film I was afraid that things would change and it would lose its relevance. Fortunately or unfortunately I think this work is still very much up to date. I really want people outside of Ukraine to see it. In Ukraine, I don't think people will be really surprised by this film. We know most of these things. However, abroad, this kind of insight into the so-called Russkiy mir, the “Russian order” is rather unusual. I think we need a conversation about Russia and ordinary Russians, the politics and culture that is behind these politics that bring people to commit such crimes. I'm looking forward to sharing my work and seeing what conversations, what discussions it will bring up in the West.
