Acclaimed documentarian Vitaly Mansky returned to his hometown of Lviv, a city living under the suspended tension of war, where even the notion of “peaceful life” is measured by the seconds between alarm and impact in his latest work Time to Target. Filmed over a year and a half, the documentary observes how the rhythm of everyday existence reshapes itself under the constant shadow of distant missiles, far from the front yet never untouched by it.
Mansky, one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary documentary cinema, has long examined systems of power and truth, from the Soviet legacy to the machinery of modern authoritarianism. In this new work, he returns to a more intimate terrain, capturing the fragility and persistence of ordinary life amid war’s invisible reach.
In the interview with Screen Anarchy, the filmmaker reflects on the impulses that led him back to Lviv, the ethical weight of filming in wartime, and his evolving understanding of freedom, belonging, and the role of art in times of moral collapse. Time to Target won the Best Czech Documentary Award at the 29th edition of Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival.
Screen Anarchy: Your film TIME TO TARGET takes you back to Lviv, your hometown. What prompted you to make this film now, during the war?
Vitaly Mansky: When the full-scale war began and all air connections were cancelled, the only way to get to Kyiv, or to any other Ukrainian city, was through Poland, and therefore through Lviv. That’s how I travelled when I was shooting Eastern Front with Filip Remunda, the Czech co-producer [Remunda served as interpreter during the interview], and later Iron. Each time I arrived in Lviv, I experienced a powerful emotional shock. The city had changed,and that feeling wouldn’t let go of me.
But it was difficult to understand what exactly had changed. This question followed me, whether I was in Ukraine, in Riga, or somewhere else. It haunted me until I realized that the only way to answer it was to make a film.
So it all began with an emotional impulse. Outwardly, the city looked the same, but its essence had changed. That restlessness wouldn’t leave me. The war had transformed Lviv in ways that words couldn’t convey. And I realized that cinema could become a way to comprehend those feelings, and perhaps to share them with others.
That’s how I began searching for a path to tell this story. The first important encounter was with a military orchestra, and the second, with a brigade of gravediggers at Lychakiv Cemetery. These two groups became the heart of the film.
Would you say that this film became a form of therapy for you, a way to process what is happening?
Yes, it was both difficult and necessary. This film helped me to rediscover myself in a changed world, to reconsider my moral and emotional bearings.
I am convinced that every person owes something to their homeland. For me, that homeland is Lviv, the city that shaped me, raised me, and made me who I am. Lviv gave me everything: my foundations, my sense of direction in life, and most importantly, my sense of freedom.
This “vaccination of freedom” that I received in Lviv has defined my whole life. It’s why I’ve spent my life fighting for freedom, and why I couldn’t continue living in Russia after it started the war against Ukraine in 2014.
Russia offered me many things, money, comfort, recognition, in exchange for giving up my freedom. Many could not resist. But I did, and I’m grateful to Lviv for that. That vaccination proved stronger than any temptation; it protected me from moral collapse.
Do you think that protection came from particular people, or from the spirit of Lviv itself?
I think a person’s character is formed by the age of fourteen. I was lucky to be formed in one of the freest cities of an unfree Soviet empire.
Life in Lviv made me different from those who grew up in the Ural, Siberian, or Central Asian cities, where there was no sense of freedom. Later, when I lived in Russia and faced the temptations of compromise, it was my upbringing in Lviv that kept me from betraying my conscience.
You could say I was “baked” on the Lviv yeast, like bread. That’s what saved me.
How did the people of Lviv react to your filming, especially during air raids and attacks?
Everyone I filmed with and spoke to knew that I had spent most of my life in Russia. And almost everyone said something like, “You’re the only Russian we can talk to, drink with, be friends with.”
That was deeply touching. Personally, I don’t see myself as a hero. On the contrary, I feel responsible, even guilty, for the war that Russia is waging. Every holder of a Russian passport bears part of that responsibility.
That’s why, when people in Lviv, on the street, in a church, or even at a cemetery, come up to me, embrace me, invite me into their homes, say kind words at the graves of their sons and husbands, it moves me deeply. Their warmth strengthens me and deepens my love for the city.
The musicians of the military orchestra are soldiers. How did they react to your presence, knowing your background?
They are all educated people. On the evening after our first meeting, they found my Wikipedia page and learned that I had once met Putin. For some time after that, I had to satisfy their curiosity more than I could actually film their everyday life.
It was astonishing for them that a person standing beside them had personally known the main war criminal and enemy of Ukraine, Putin.
For about a month, they bombarded me with questions, about Putin himself, about his doubles, his personality, his family, his children. They were curious about everything. Only when their questions ran out were we finally able to work calmly.
Is your film mostly improvised, or did you still have some structural framework?
It’s an observational film. To say that it had no structure at all would be inaccurate, the framework was the calendar year.
I wanted to tell a story about time. I knew the orchestra played at funerals every single day, and that a year later they would still be doing the same. So although much of it was filmed through improvisation, it all took place within a clear temporal and emotional structure.
The finished film runs three hours. How much material did you shoot in total?
Hundreds of hours, two hundred, three hundred, I didn’t count precisely.
For the first time in my long career, I took the camera in my own hands and filmed as the second cameraman. It was the only way to achieve the necessary intimacy and authenticity.
Originally, we planned a ninety-minute film. But in the editing room, we realized that shortening it destroyed the atmosphere and the truth of what was happening. The viewer needs time to enter that world. So the three-hour version became not just the best one, it became the only possible one.
In fact, three hours is the minimum length. Ideally, the film could last five.
This immersive form seems to affect audiences very strongly.
Yes. Just yesterday in Jihlava, a viewer from Ukraine came up to me. He has been living here since the beginning of the full-scale war and watches all the films made about Ukraine. He told me mine was the first one he truly believed in. That is probably the most important kind of recognition one can receive.
You mentioned trust as the foundation of the film. How did that manifest in your approach to image and editing?
We built the film entirely on trust. We treated the viewer with deep respect, giving them the freedom to exist within the space of the film. We didn’t use editing as a form of pressure.
There is not a single panoramic movement in the film, I consider the pan to be a kind of violence toward the viewer. It’s like grabbing someone by the hair and turning their head to show them what you want them to see. We decided to completely eliminate that approach.
The film is shot statically, leaving room for the viewer, for their own gaze, their own internal motion. This principle of trust guided us through every stage of production.
Do you follow other Ukrainian films about the war? Do they influence you as an artist?
I’ll answer very carefully. What I’m going to say is self-evident to me, but I realize the subject is delicate.
There’s a noticeable tendency toward idealization in Ukrainian cinema today. But life isn’t black and white. We can’t drink distilled water—it’s made up of half-tones, of ambiguities.
Art begins where doubt begins, where reflection appears. Right now, there isn’t much of that. Ukrainian cinema is more clenched, like a fist, trying to prove to itself and to the world the righteousness of Ukraine’s cause. But that righteousness is self-evident—it doesn’t need to be proven.
Art is about something else, about nuance, subtlety, contradiction.
Think of Jack Nicholson’s character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Is he a positive or a negative figure? Everyone will answer differently, and that’s exactly where art begins.
Many Ukrainian films made near the front are very immediate and impulsive. What does it mean for you personally to make a film about war?
I make films about what I understand, what I want to understand, and what I live through. The front line is an unnatural environment for me. I probably wouldn’t be able to make a film like 20 Days in Mariupol or 2,000 Meters to Andriivka.
But I believe that 2,000 Meters to Andriivka truly deserves the Oscar. It’s a pity that most likely it will not receive it. 20 Days in Mariupol won not because it is an outstanding film, but because the filmmaking community felt the importance of the subject and wanted to support it.
I, on the other hand, filmed what remains outside the frame of the larger war narrative, what slips out of focus. Every film is a small stone in the mosaic of the world. It seemed to me that one stone was missing, and I added it with my film.
I’m sure this film will endure. In twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred years, people will still watch it, perhaps not in cinemas, but in galleries, where it will be shown as a visual canvas of time.
And I dream that the soldiers buried on Mars Field will never again be exhumed, that their graves will remain eternal.
Filming during wartime must have brought both technical and ethical challenges. How did you deal with them?
My observational method requires the camera to stay present for long stretches of time. Finding a cinematographer who would agree to travel to Ukraine under such conditions turned out to be impossible, not a single European cameraman agreed.
So I invited a photographer from Lviv. For him, these were practically his first film shoots. Every day, I didn’t so much teach him as explain, how we work, what we’re looking for.
In that sense, it became a kind of visual dialogue between us.
For the last three and a half years, I’ve been living almost constantly in Ukraine. Neither I nor my mother nor my close ones have ever gone down into a shelter during an air raid.
If you look closely at the scene in the theater, where the performance is interrupted by the sound of an alarm, you can see that people are smiling. No one runs to the shelter. The theater is obliged to make the announcement, but the audience is already accustomed to it.
People in cafés, on the streets, at home, no one hides. Everyone has become used to the shelling. It has become something like rain or snow, a part of everyday life.
Cover image courtesy of Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival.