When the Russian invasion began on 24 February 2022, Artem Ryzhykov volunteered to join the Ukrainian army. Equipped with a machine gun and a camera, the filmmaker documents his life as a soldier. But soon it becomes obvious that imagination and reality are drifting apart. While at first exploding bombs shock him so much that he drops to the ground in the barricaded kitchen, and while burnt corpses of a defeated Russian military unit at the Irpin front line provide sensational images, euphoria and sensitivity gradually get lost on the battlefield. Ryzhykov slowly loses his observer’s perspective, the camera degenerates into a “toy” and is replaced by the weapon.
The war leaves traumatic marks. Ryzhykov is increasingly alienated from his own self and his private environment. The overwhelming emotional ballast is no longer easily catalysed, spaces for reflection shrink and the phone calls with his wife Irusya become colder and more tight-lipped. Co-director Juan Camilo Cruz has crafted a narrative strand of immediate power from more than one thousand hours of video material: an intimate insight into the life of a person who is trying to cope with all the chaos.