Documentary is exclusively debuting the trailer for Notes From a Besieged City, a 78-minute documentary by Polish filmmaker, photographer, and reporter Mateusz Mularski. Following its world premiere at the Krakow Film Festival, the film will make its international premiere in IDFA’s Frontlight section.
Filmed between 2023 and 2025, the black-and-white feature follows four civilians who remain in Kherson, the southern Ukrainian port city retaken from Russian forces in November 2022 but still exposed to shelling and drone attacks. Its subjects include an aid volunteer, a Russian-born journalist who settled in Ukraine, a photojournalist, and an elderly woman. Everyday routines—working, making tea, tending a garden—persist amid the threat of violence.
Mularski initially expected the military to play a major role in the project. But four visits to Kherson, totaling roughly three and a half months, changed its direction. “We realized that the story of this war, at least in the material we had collected, was not primarily about the military or the soldiers,” he tells Documentary. “It was about the civilian population—about the people of Kherson and the way they were trying to live their lives under these extraordinary circumstances.”
One of the protagonists, Oleksandr, left Kherson with his wife after narrowly surviving an attack. After eight months in western Ukraine, they returned because they could not establish a sustainable life away from home. He resumed his job as chief photographer at the city’s main newspaper, despite living only five or six kilometers from Russian positions.
For Mularski, the greatest surprise was not the residents’ resilience but the speed with which extreme danger becomes familiar. “Of all the things I saw, what surprised me most was not how resilient these people are, or how difficult life is there, but how quickly human beings adapt to a situation that would seem unbearable, even unthinkable, to those of us who live in peace,” he says.
Shot in a 4:3 frame, the documentary also uses monochrome images to evoke the unsettling experience of living in a place where ordinary time seems to have stalled. “Black and white was meant to make the footage feel unreal, to symbolically express what I went through as a filmmaker there,” Mularski explains. “Besides, if you look at the footage in color, you’ll notice there isn’t much color left: the war has drained almost all of it from the city.”
Notes From a Besieged City is produced by Joanna Zielińska for Warsaw-based Big Wave Films, with cinematography by Tadeusz Chudy, editing by Svitlana Topor, and sound design by Agata Chodyra. Co-financed by the Polish Film Institute, the documentary earned Zielińska the Best Producer award at the Krakow Film Festival.
