After five years of detention in Russia for protesting against the annexation of Crimea by Moscow, Ukrainian director Oleh Sentsov took up arms in revenge. Winner in 2018 of the European Sakharov Prize for Human Rights awarded by the European Parliament, he enlisted as a volunteer in the “Territorial Defense” from the first days of the war in Ukraine which began on February 24. He confided in AFP in a street in kyiv.
Note that the director’s first name Oleh is often written Oleg, which corresponds to the phonetic transcription of his name in Russian.
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“This fight is not as we imagine in the cinema“, explains the 45-year-old filmmaker. “There isn’t much melee and automatic weapon fire. Most of the time: make way for the artillery, and your job is to hold the front in a trench and not die under the bombardment“, he says. His story is regularly interrupted by the coughing fits of a bad cold caught during a break of a few days after a turn on the front in freezing weather.
Oleh Sentsov’s career as an independent director seemed promising, before being turned upside down by the pro-European Maidan revolution in 2014, then Russia’s annexation of Crimea to its territory. He was about to make Rhinoafter a first film in 2011, Gamershot for just $20,000, when he was arrested by the Russians.
Accused of planning arson, he was convicted and sent to a penal colony in the Russian Arctic. He lost 30 kilos there after a 145-day hunger strike, before being released in 2019.
Leaning against a barricade, he says his detention convinced him that Moscow would not be satisfied with taking Crimea alone. “After my release, some of my friends said to me: Oh, you are so radical, you started hating the Russians, they are not that bad“, he says. “Today, they understand me, because I spent five years there.
I saw how they treat Ukrainians, Europeans, with their imperial ambitions, cruelty
He joined the Territorial Defense “from the first days of the war” and spent two weeks serving at checkpoints on the outskirts of the capital. But he was then sent to “the first line of defense“, alongside army units in the forests outside kyiv. According to him, the Russian forces inflicted a “Vietnam” on the Ukrainian forces with intense artillery barrages. But without progress.
For now, his career is just a distant memory. “I no longer film. First because I don’t have time. Then because I don’t want to“, he blurts out. He was offered a job in an official press office, because of his notoriety, “but it was not my path, my path is that of a simple soldier“, he says. He has also received letters of support from the profession, including that of the European Film Academy.
In wartime, it doesn’t matter if you are a director, a bus driver or a worker, we are all soldiers.
He does not despair of finding the cinema one day, even if it will take him time before having the “cool head“to make a film about the conflict.”I don’t know what kind of film I will do. I had written several screenplays before the war. Maybe I’ll find some new ideas here“, he says. In the immediate term, he will see life through the scope of a rifle, and not a camera eyepiece: “I have lived several lives, my life has changed, my job has changed. Cinema is just a part of my life and now my life is where I believe it is most useful for my country“.