Latest news with #DocFest
Telegraph
29-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
‘I filmed myself getting shot': the heroic film-maker who joined Ukraine's frontline
When cinematographer Artem Ryzhykov set out to film Ukraine's resistance to the Russian invasion of 2022, he did not know what would happen to him. At first, he hid where he was from his wife and family; later, he began to feel he was hiding something from himself. It was as if he was 'in the middle of a play, but I'm not acting. I'm just observing, with the camera,' he tells me. Gradually, he realised: 'If I'm in the action, I have to act. I have to save people or engage the enemy – just do something. Film-making right now for me, just to observe what other people are doing? No, not any more.' Ryzhykov's journey from passive recorder to combatant is traced step-by-step in the superb war documentary, A Simple Soldier, which recently premiered at Sheffield DocFest. Unlike most films about an ongoing conflict, it is not a snapshot but stretches over hundreds of days at different frontlines. And remarkably, the film may not have been made at all had it not been for his co-director, the Bafta winner Juan Camilo Cruz, who crafted its central narrative from thousands of hours of footage shot by Ryzhykov before he put down his camera. Cruz is in his native Colombia when we chat; Ryzhykov is away from the front, briefly, and driving through Kyiv, where he's attempting to get a visa to attend the DocFest, before returning to his unit. The two had not met in person but knew each other's work and it was Cruz who had encouraged Ryzhykov to begin the project. He had had to sign a contract to join a volunteer force for three years to be allowed to film them. But once at the front, he realised that the contract counted for little and he was expected to cook for the battalion and clean the toilets, rather than film. We see him being blasted by the company's commander – furious that he had gone down to the front line with his camera to shoot, where he could have got himself and others killed. Not only was he completely unused to the reality of combat – early footage finds him diving for cover every time a shell lands nearby; 'So if I fart, you'll also jump?' the commander scoffs – but he also thought that he'd put his film career 'in the garbage'. Cruz encouraged him to just keep shooting whatever he could, and to film his own 'struggle', he says. 'I was ready to kill him, this dude from the internet that I'd never met, who says, 'just keep filming yourself.' I was having a mental breakdown.' Ryzhykov's father had been a Soviet fighter pilot, who was fascinated by film-making. He had taught his son to use a camera from an early age and how to edit. Artem, who was born shortly before the break-up of the Soviet Union, had grown up wanting to be a pilot too, but his ambitions had shifted towards cinematography. After leaving film school early, he'd begun building a career outside the mainstream. 'I was the guy who doesn't want to make TV,' he says. He was working on 'very small artistic projects' in film and theatre, when he crossed paths with an American stage director, Chad Gracia, who wanted to make a documentary about a friend of Artem's who was obsessed with the role of a vast Soviet-era spy radar in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. And so, Ryzhykov became the cinematographer for the eerie The Russian Woodpecker (2015) – the title referred to the sound the radar made – which went on to win a grand jury prize at the Sundance film festival. It made Ryzhykov's name but also provided a visceral demonstration of Russia's unwillingness to loosen its hold on post-independence Ukraine. He was working on the film when protests against the pro-Putin government of then-president Viktor Yanukovych began to foment around Maidan Square in central Kyiv. 'We were living next door to Maidan, and I was walking there and shooting almost every day, just for fun, because I loved this revolutionary experience, it was very romantic,' he tells me. But when the police opened fire on protesters in February 2014, Ryzhykov was hit. He captured it on camera, complete with the whistling crack of the bullets thudding into him. His camera was smashed and the injury to his right arm severe enough to need hospital treatment. Yet he couldn't risk going to a hospital in Kyiv, he says, 'because everybody who went to a hospital after Maidan, police were taking them and interrogating them, and most disappeared – it was a whisper that they were shooting them in the woods. So I was very scared to go to hospital.' He left that day, still bloody from the attack, to get treatment in another country, and a few days later, he recalls, 'Yanukovych had fallen.' After the revolution, The Russian Woodpecker was released, and Ryzhykov's career gained momentum, until Covid-19 brought the industry to a standstill. Two years later as invasion loomed and civilians began joining local defence units to defend Ukraine, he began filming a territorial defence force training in Kyiv. There he met medic Marta and her husband Sergiy, who feature prominently in A Simple Soldier. When the attack came, at dawn on February 24, 2022, from Russia, Crimea and Belarus, Ryzhykov determined that he would film the battle to repel the invaders. Russia's assault on Kyiv from Belarus had taken Ukraine by surprise; its defences near the capital were thin, especially on its northwestern side. A smattering of soldiers had been deployed to defend the western route into Kyiv. As armoured columns carrying 10,000 Russian soldiers advanced along the Dnipro River, Ryzhykov was among the hastily mobilised volunteers sent to defend Irpin, at a key crossing point of the Irpin river, which led straight into the city. As Ukraine fought to block the advance, Ryzhykov found himself unprepared for the confusion of the front and the immediate threat to his life. 'It was very difficult, especially the first day, [the troops I came with] lost me, and I had to spend a full day alone without my unit, under Russian fire. There was a sniper there, and I was hiding, and I didn't know what to do, I was on my own, and it wasn't until the next day that they picked me up and said, 'Oh, were you lost?'' Ukraine won a narrow victory in the Battle of Irpin. A Simple Soldier documents how Ryzhykov was then deployed 300 miles east of Kyiv, to Kharkiv, where Fantom, the decorated commander of Ukraine's intelligence company, had him assigned to his team. 'For a year, I was a press officer of the whole battalion, so I was able just to shoot everything everywhere, and not be involved in the fighting,' he says, but when the unit began to lose people, he realised 'it wasn't enough, especially after the death of a few of my close friends.' One event crystallised a growing feeling. He had been given permission to film in the medical unit, where Marta was now treating the wounded from the front. 'I spent a week there,' he tells me, after a damaging attack left more than 100 soldiers injured. At first, he shot footage under the feet of the stressed medics. Then, he says, 'I just left my camera for a few days, and I started to help, next to Marta, just helping to save people day after day. After a while, the doctors and everybody there, they recognised me as one of them, not a strange journalist who came just for an hour to get good footage.' In one vivid sequence after that, elation turns to agony. Ryzhykov captured a firefight with retreating Russian soldiers, after which Fantom was badly injured by a booby-trap bomb. Soon after, the cinematographer decided he would leave his privileged role and go 'to the very bottom, to be just a conscript. I started from the very beginning and learnt how to fight and how to be a soldier, not a filmmaker.' Not only did he find himself on the front line of Ukraine's existential struggle against a historical enemy, but on the cutting edge of modern warfare, watching it being reshaped in front of his eyes. 'I'm telling you, war is changing every month,' he says. Since both sides started using drones three years ago, it has altered beyond recognition from once decisive tank and artillery battles. 'This simple tool, the Chinese drone that costs $3,000 – the Mavic drones – they have changed war entirely. 'What we were doing in the first year of war, like classic fights, now, it's not common at all. Everything has moved to drones, and because of this, we have increased the 'grey line'. (This refers to the contested areas along the front line where fighting is ongoing and control is disputed.) In Irpin, we were 500 metres from the Russians. Then in Kharkiv, because of drones, two kilometres. In the operation I was involved in three days ago, we are already staying 15 kilometres from the Russians. But it still feels like zero, because they still see you, and we see them.' In a nightmare sequence towards the end of the film, when Ryzhykov and his unit are sent to the very front line in Kupiansk at night, we see the reality of Ukraine's existential fight. There are Russian troops 'everywhere', and drones dropping bombs all around them. By this time, Ryzhykov says, he no longer felt afraid. He could feel war's dehumanising power. 'A difference between Russians and Ukrainians from a war perspective, he says, is that 'Russians are a very, very, strong enemy and they are ready to die anytime, anywhere, like Japanese samurai. They're just dying for no reason, but for Ukrainians now, instead of getting scared, we just laugh. It helps us to not lose our minds.' He's not following the news about potential ceasefires, or Trump's claim that he could stop the war. 'The West is not strong enough to stop it,' he says. 'Sanctions don't work at all. Negotiations don't work at all. Ukrainians are ready to leave this war, to make peace, to get on with their lives, but the Russians aren't. I'm in the middle of this still, we're praying for peace, but I've realised that it's my generation of war, my generation of people who would fight for the rest of their life.'
Broadcast Pro
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Broadcast Pro
Palestine Film Institute to present three documentaries at Sheffield DocFest
Through the Palestine Showcase, PFI continues to champion Palestinian cinema on the global stage, providing space for creative resistance and meaningful dialogue amid efforts to preserve and share Palestinian stories with the world. The Palestine Film Institute (PFI) is set to present three feature-length documentaries in progress as part of the Palestine Showcase at this year's Sheffield DocFest. Organised in collaboration with Sheffield DocFest, the British Council and Switzerland's AKKA Films, the special screening will take place on June 21 at the Montgomery Theatre in Sheffield, exclusively for DocFest delegates. This initiative underscores PFI's ongoing commitment to preserving and amplifying Palestinian narratives through international platforms. By offering filmmakers and producers a stage to present their works-in-progress, the showcase aims to connect them with key figures in the film industry, including festival programmers and decision-makers, and to foster engagement with the broader global cinema community. The three selected projects each reflect distinct aspects of the Palestinian experience, blending powerful storytelling with creative cinematic approaches. Theft of Fire, directed by Amer Shomali and produced by Rashid Abdelhamid, Ina Fichman, and Remi Grellety, is a genre-bending documentary that imagines an art heist to reclaim stolen Palestinian antiquities. White Resistance: Letters to the Living, directed by Mahmoud Atassi and produced by Abdulrahman Alkilany, draws from harrowing footage captured inside Gaza's Kamal Edwan hospital and follows the legal efforts to secure the release of its detained director, Hussam AbuSafiya. Meanwhile, Reclaiming Time, directed and produced by Fuad Hindieh, takes a surreal and visually rich look at a filmmaker's quest to legally change his birthdate—an act that transforms into a symbolic journey to reclaim time lost to occupation.
