Oleh Sentsov in “Accidental” of Karlovy Vary-Premiere war documentary “Real”

Ukrainian filmmaker Oleh Sentsov sits in a brightly lit apartment in Kiev, his wife Veronika by his side, her hand over her right ear. “What? What? What?” he says inquiringly Variety to repeat the question. More than two years on the front lines of Ukraine’s war with Russia have given Sentsov little chance for levity, but he allows himself a mischievous grin. After suffering, by his count, “six contusions and two perforations” in his right ear drum, the director has lost a significant portion of his hearing. May or may not be returned. Sentsov shrugs. Many of his fellow Ukrainians, he knows, have suffered far worse fates.

It’s a point driven home by the director’s latest film, “Real,” a documentary look at the war in Ukraine that’s world premiering with a special screening at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. Described as an “accidental” film, the 88-minute film consists entirely of footage filmed by Sentsov in a trench in Ukraine’s Donbass region after a nearby unit was ambushed by Russian forces.

It’s a chilling snapshot of a brief moment in a war that has claimed tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians since it began. Reliving that day is still a struggle for Sentsov, 47, a father of four who expects to return to the front soon. “It’s hard to watch at first, but it’s an immersive experience,” he says. “There is nothing fake about it. It’s raw material.”

The director is talking to him Variety on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the battle shown in “Real”. Two days later, he will visit the widows of several soldiers who were killed that day by Russian troops. His close-cropped military cut, curled into a widow’s peak, has gone gray; so does the goatee that frames his square jaw. Asked how it feels to be at home in Kiev, surrounded by his wife and children, his answer is blunt, military. “It’s better than other countries,” he says. “Usually, I’m in a bad place, so this is good.”

“Real” was filmed on the tenth day of a Ukrainian counteroffensive last June in the Zaporizhzhia region in the country’s southeast. Sentsov’s unit had struggled to break through the Russian defense line, but that morning, they had received orders to penetrate deeper into Russian-occupied territory. As the commanding officer, Sentsov hurried back to bolster his unit’s defenses with more troops and supplies, but a small detachment of Ukrainian soldiers was intercepted at a position codenamed Real. “They were surrounded by the Russians on all sides,” he says.

Separated by more than a mile of no-man’s land and under constant barrage of Russian artillery, Sentsov was the only person able to communicate with the stranded unit. The siege lasted from about 4 in the morning until 8 in the evening; Sentsov began recording sometime around 8 a.m., his camera sweeping back and forth across the trench where he and his unit had dug in, while a soldier on the other end of the radio called for reinforcements. It was pure luck that the scene was captured when Sentsov got up to adjust his helmet, accidentally turning on his GoPro, which recorded until the battery died. It would be six months before he realized he had produced an eyewitness account of the war that began with Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

His initial impulse was to delete the footage. After watching it, however, he sent it to his longtime producer Denis Ivanov — his collaborator on Rhino, which premiered at the 2021 Venice Film Festival — and other civilians who didn’t have it. experienced the war first hand. He wasn’t sure if the footage had any cinematic value, but they impressed him that what he had captured was “fair and honest reporting” and “a true document of the war”. Ivanov would go on to produce Real through his Arthouse Traffic banner, co-producing with Boris T. Matić and Lana Matić of Croatia’s Propeller Film and UK veteran Mike Downey of Downey Ink. Sentsov, who shares a production credit, also assisted with coloring and sound, holed up in a post-production studio in Kiev during his rare breaks from the front.

Much of “Real” takes place in the few square meters in the trenches where Sentsov and his comrades were holed up, radioing the besieged unit as gunfire and artillery blasts rang out off-camera. It’s a weird and strange viewing experience that the director says mirrors, in whatever small way, the experience of combat. “When you’re at war, you’re basically blind. “Ninety percent of the information you gather from sounds,” he says. “There’s a helicopter, there’s artillery fire, there’s fighting, there’s screaming. All this information, your brain is not gathering by looking at objects, but by observing the sounds around you. It was very important to show that.”

Despite having no military experience before the Russian invasion, Sentsov has become battle-hardened after more than two years on the front line. On the day Russian forces crossed the border, he joined the volunteer Territorial Defense of Ukraine, but within months he left to join special forces, telling a reporter about Le Monde that the volunteer unit was “too boring for [his] taste.”

He regularly posts about the war on social media, recounting his countless brushes with death, offering tributes to fallen comrades and cataloging the physical and emotional toll of war. “It was hard to write about all this yesterday, after a fierce battle,” he wrote after a narrow escape last fall. “It is difficult to write today, being already safe. It will be difficult to write tomorrow, when all will be memories and nightmares.” In another post, he wrote: “You only really feel life when death passes you by.”

Since making his directorial debut with the 2011 drama Gamer, Sentsov’s life and career have often been overshadowed by geopolitical events in his troubled region. In 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea and occupied the Donbass region, Sentsov – a native of Crimea – was arrested by Russian authorities on false terrorism charges and sentenced to 20 years in a penal colony near the Arctic Circle. The director vehemently denied the charges, at one point going on a hunger strike that lasted 145 days, while an international campaign for his release attracted a coalition of governments, rights groups, industry bodies, literary groups and Hollywood stars.

In September 2019, he was released as part of a prisoner swap between Russia and Ukraine, and just a few months later Sentsov walked the red carpet at the Berlin Film Festival with his dystopian drama Numbers – a film that he wrote and co-directed it while behind bars. He then filmed Rhino, a crime drama set in the Ukrainian underworld in the 1990s, hoping to close a turbulent chapter in his life and make a fresh start. When he appeared at the Lido for the film’s premiere in Venice, he said Variety he was ready to “pursue a civilian life” and leave behind the events of a turbulent decade.

However, once again history has intervened. While Sentsov hopes to be in Karlovy Vary when “Real” premieres, there’s no telling what the fight has in store; in Ukraine, he says, it’s impossible to plan more than a week ahead. It’s too early, too, to speculate when he’ll return to film, though he has at least two features — including his English-language debut, Shining World — currently in the works. “For now, I am a soldier. I’m in the fight and I do what I have to do,” he says. “But I’m sure that in the future, I will make films.”

Until then, he remains focused on the daily struggle to defend his homeland, protect his soldiers and live to see his family in Kiev again, including a young child born after the Russian invasion. As he recently posted on Facebook: “Having a home where your family welcomes you gives a whole different level of motivation here on the front lines. You know exactly who you’re risking your life for, you know exactly who you have to survive for.”