Intercepted

Destruction in the Ukraine war shown through lengthy tableaux. Soldiers’ phone calls to families reveal a parallel world. Sound and image confront one another.

Ukrainian intelligence services have intercepted thousands of phone calls Russian soldiers made from the battlefield in Ukraine to their families and friends in Russia, painting a stark picture of the cruelty of war. Juxtaposed with images of the destruction caused by the invasion and the day-to-day life of the Ukrainian people who resist and rebuild, the voices of the Russian soldiers – ranging from being filled with heroic illusions to complete disappointment and loss of reason, from looting to committing more horrible war crimes, from propaganda to doubt and disillusionment – expose the whole scope of the dehumanizing power of war.

INTERCEPTED | Oksana Karpovych | 2024 | Canada, France, Ukraine

FESTIVALS & AWARDS (SELECTION) 

Berlinale, 2024 – World Premiere, Amnesty International Film Award, Special Mention by Ecumenical Jury | CPH:DOX, 2024 | Hot Docs, 2024 | Hong Kong IFF, 2024 – Special Mention | BAFICI, 2024 – Best Direction, SIGNIS Award | Krakow FF, 2024 – Best Film on Social Issues, Best Documentary | Galway Film Fleadh, 2024 – Best Documentary | 2025 LUX Audience Award Nominee

DIRECTOR’S BIO 

Oksana Karpovych is a Ukrainian-Canadian filmmaker, writer and photographer born in Kyiv. She lives and works between Kyiv and Montreal. Her first feature documentary Don’t Worry, the Doors Will Open won the New Visions Award at RIDM in 2019 and received a Special Mention at Hot Docs in 2020. In her projects, Karpovych explores the everyday life and oral histories of ordinary people, and how state politics intrude into the private sphere, influencing the communities she intimately documents. She is a Cultural Studies graduate of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine and a Film Production graduate of Concordia University in Montreal.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

When the Russian full-scale invasion started, I was in Ukraine and happened to be working as a local producer with Al Jazeera English. This work allowed me to access many places in different Ukrainian regions where I witnessed Russian war crimes. At night after my work, I developed a habit of listening to the “intercepts”: intercepted phone calls of the Russian soldiers in Ukraine calling their families back home that were obtained and publicly released by Ukraine’s security services. The discrepancy between the brutal reality that I was living during the day and the things I was hearing at night was shocking. In the intercepts, the Russians sounded human. That was the most painful thing to accept: Why do humans do such inhumane things? This question has brought me to the film, which is based on a simple juxtaposition of two realities trying to understand the full complexity of the “Russian order”, to comprehend what kind of thinking is behind the invasion.