Film Forum

After the February 2022 invasion, the Security Service of Ukraine released intercepted phone calls from Russian soldiers to their families — sharing their innermost fears, contempt for Ukrainians, and hopes for a swift victory; while blithely detailing atrocities they perpetrate and goods they pillage. In INTERCEPTED, Ukrainian-Canadian filmmaker Oksana Karpovych juxtaposes these intimate conversations with eerie images of deserted, war-torn Ukrainian homes and villages, shot just behind the front lines. Absent graphic imagery, Karpovych evokes a vivid, haunting tableaux of war, and the psychological disconnect between oppressors and the lives they’ve destroyed.

2024     93 MIN.     CANADA / FRANCE / UKRAINE     GRASSHOPPER FILM
IN RUSSIAN WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES

Reviews

CRITIC’S PICK. “Powerful…A haunting, often jolting depiction of the profound toll that the war has exerted on soldiers and civilians alike…Using a mixture of vivid, precisely framed moving and still images, she takes you across the war-ravaged country…Another crucial eyewitness document of the Russia-Ukraine war, one that makes the personal stakes painfully vivid.”
– Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“SUPERB. The ground-level, day-to-day realities of war too often disappear when the media zoom out to consider geopolitically important events, so documentaries such as INTERCEPTED are essential tools of understanding. In little more than an hour and a half, it provides an education into the experience of the continuing atrocity with which only the most detailed journalistic accounts can compete.”
– Kyle Smith, The Wall Street Journal

“Grade: A. The movie’s stylistic tension, between images of life being lived (or having been lived), and disembodied voices portending death, connects the dots between ideology and action, between propaganda and bloodshed… it points its microphone unflinchingly at the darkest parts of the human soul, while forcing the viewer to hold the camera and search for the brutality within its images and empty spaces. It makes the audience, and their recognition, a necessary ingredient to portraying the bigger picture.”
– Siddhant Adlakha, IndieWire

"A portrait of the war in Ukraine told through haunting images and soundscapes...A spare psychological portrait of soldiers at war. Gleaned directly from their conversations, this is an honest depiction of how empathy disappears and malice takes over.”
– Murtada Elfadl, Variety

“A triumph for public domain-derived journalism (which is Karpovych’s background) and the non-fiction filmmaking that can spring from it.”
– David Katz, Cineuropa