Songs of Slow Burning Earth

Olha Zhurba: Songs of Slow Burning Earth (UA/DK/SE/FR 2024).

Language: Ukrainian

Screened with English subtitles at Ukrainian Film Days, Helsinki, Orion, 9 Nov 2024.

Vimeo screener viewed at home 9 Nov 2024.

AA: Olha Zhurba's Songs of Slow Burning Earth is a quietly devastating poetic documentary anthology about the Russo-Ukrainian war that started in 2014 following Ukraine's Revolution with Russia's clandestine attack on Crimea and Donbas and escalated into Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Ukrainian war films such as 20 Days in Mariupol, We Will Not Fade Away and Invisible Battalion have pursued their testimonies with vigorous energy and all-encompassing dignity more than compensating their low-definition visual qualities.

Distinctions of Songs of Slow Burning Earth include a high visual quality and an exquisite sense of composition. It is a lyrical masterpiece that registers the acute horror of a devastation that all but transcends the limits of normal experience and understanding. But the greatest distinction of Olha Zhurba's work is that it is an act of such transcendence.

It is divided into chapters that might work as independent short films but grow into an organic whole. I am reminded of Roberto Rossellini's Paisà, perhaps the greatest war film ever made, competing for a Finnish viewer with the first film adaptation of The Unknown Soldier.

The chapters include (the titles are mine): - the un-world of war - evacuees at a Kyiv railway station and on the road - the brutality of the war in testimonies of the evacuees and at the emergency call center - food aid at the bread factory at Mykolaiv - children's drawing lesson at an elementary school - the winter journey of a funeral procession: a long ride along a country highway of a truck carrying the coffin of a war hero, people by the roadside joining in holy commemoration, the camera mostly registering everything in a forward tracking shot through the windshield - the landscape after the battle: cleaning it from junk and wreckage - children playing war games - the coroner's office: the arduous task of the identification of corpses - rehabilitation center ("the superhuman center"): war invalids with leg prostheses, exercises in wheelchairs, learning to walk again - the Motherland Monument in Kyiv: removing the hammer and sickle marker - a high school in Ukraine: how do you see the future? - military drill at a Russian school to the tune of "The Persistent Soldier" - sunset on a foggy night.

Common to all Ukrainian war films I have seen is a talent in catching the immediate experience and a negative aesthetics: portraying the anti-life, the anti-beautiful.

Yet like all Ukrainian war films I have seen this is also a work of hope and dignity. Also a manifestation of determination and resilience.

...

VIMEO: SONGS OF SLOW BURNING EARTH

Docudays UA

An audiovisual diary of Ukraine’s immersion into the abyss of the first two years of Russia's full invasion, made up of places, occasional characters, rare dialogues, intraframe sounds and silences which, when put together, capture the chronology of how the war became normalised. Against the backdrop of this (meta)physical landscape of collective disaster, a new generation of Ukrainians aspires to imagine the future.

Director and writer Olha Zhurba

Cinematographers Volodymyr Usyk, Viacheslav Tsvetkov, Misha Lubarsky

Editor Michael Aaglund

Music Yaroslav Tatarchenko (bunht)

Sound Pavlo Melnyk

Producer Darya Bassel (Moon Man / Ukraine)

Co-producers Anne Köhncke (Final Cut for Real / Denmark), Kerstin Übelacker (We Have a Plan / Sweden)

Uploaded on 13. kesäk. 2024 at 23.02

UKRAINIAN FILM DAYS (HELSINKI 2024)

SONGS OF SLOW BURNING EARTH

Ukraina, Tanska, Ruotsi, Ranska, 2024

UKRAINIAN FILM DAYS

Alkuperäinen nimi:Songs of Slow Burning Earth

Ohjaaja:Olha Zhurba

Ikäraja:18

Maa:Ukraina, Tanska, Ruotsi, Ranska

Valmistumisvuosi:2024

Ensi-ilta:9.11.2024

Kesto:95 min

Tekstitys:english

Elokuvan maailman ensiesitys tapahtui tämän vuoden syyskuussa Venetsian kansainvälisellä elokuvafestivaalilla. “Songs of Slow Burning Earth” heijastaa havainnot sodan normalisoitumisesta. Venäjän hyökkäyksen ensimmäisten viikkojen paniikki- ja kauhusoinnut muuttuvat hitaasti kuoleman ja tuhon hyväksymisen tunnottomiksi hiljaisuuksiksi, joista tulee lopulta traaginen normaalisuus paikalliselle väestölle, mutta vain jälkiajattelu muulle maailmalle. Kollektiivisen katastrofin (meta)fyysisen maiseman taustalla ukrainalaisten uusi sukupolvi haluaa kuvitella tulevaisuutta.

Näytöstä seuraa 40 minuutin Q&A Olha Zhurban kanssa.

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The world premiere of the film took place this September at the Venice International Film Festival. ”Songs of the Slowly Burning Earth” are reflections on the topic of the normalization of war. The ragged chords of panic and terror of the first weeks of the Russian invasion slowly transform into a numb silence of acceptance of death and destruction. In the end, it becomes a tragic norm for local population, and for the rest of the world – something secondary. Against the background of the (meta)physical landscape of a collective catastrophe, a new generation of Ukrainians seeks to imagine the future.

The screening will be followed by a 40-min Q&A with Olha Zhurba.