UKRAINE: ENEMY IN THE WOODS Review

The British BBC documentary Ukraine: Enemy in the Woods dryly and with restraint shows the harshness and bloodiness of life and death on the Ukrainian front this past winter. Drones and increasingly precise artillery are turning life on both sides of the front into a constant lottery with death or loss of limb.

A single Ukrainian infantry company finds itself in a life-and-death struggle to defend the eastern front against intense Russian attacks. This is an extraordinary portrait of lives endangered by the turmoil of a bloody war, filmed by the Ukrainian soldiers themselves.

With exclusive access to the tightly controlled front line, the film follows the mission of a special battalion as they make a single deployment to one of Ukraine's most violent fronts: a snow-covered forest near Kupyansk. Their mission is to defend a railway line, a key strategic asset that, if captured, will allow Russia to launch a direct attack on Ukraine's second-largest city, Kharkov.

The men of the company defend a section of front 550 yards wide. Several thousand of these types of companies are fighting across the entire front of about 950 miles. The film also makes it poignantly clear how dangerous the ubiquitous small drones that work like mini-bombers are on either side of the front. "You can't see them when they're thirty meters away," says one soldier. They pose a constant threat.

The documentary does not so much follow the men, it records them. The classic documentary fly-on-the-wall has become the 'actioncam' - the GoPro mounted on the helmet. The protagonists, the soldiers, are partly cameramen themselves. It is as if you are with them in the middle of a contemporary version of the latest film adaptation from Remarque's All is Quiet on the Western Front (Berger; 2022) But here without expensive Netflix production design, because everything is unfortunately real here, including the corpses. And just like in the Netflix production, the enemy becomes dehumanized in the eyes of those who fight here every day. The stakes are high, it's the right to exist for your own country.

"Jeder Mensch ein Künstler" said artist Joseph Beuys fifty years ago. You could expand that now in war from Russia against Ukraine to 'Jeder Soldat ist ein Kameramann,' 'Every soldier is a camera operator'. Having said that, the whole of Ukraine: Enemy in the Woods is fascinatingly well crafted by director Jamie Roberts and editor Kate Spankie. Together with the work of the soldiers this makes Ukraine: Enemy in the Woods a really impressive document.

At the moment, the film can be seen on the Odyssee website (link here).