“Made Out of Necessity”: Oksana Karpovych Discusses the Chronology of ‘Intercepted’

Like many Ukrainians, I associate the first weeks of the invasion with listening to intercepted calls of Russian soldiers that went viral on Telegram channels. I distinctly remember the feeling of scrolling the news feed, spectating horrific images of destruction and death across the country and simultaneously playing those intercepts. This discrepancy between the visual suffering of my country and the blind hate in the voice of the aggressors created an unspeakable feeling of horrendous fear and dissonance that I found difficult to process. Ukrainian filmmaker Oksana Karpovych’s Intercepted conveys these feelings better than anyone else. Visually, the film shows static images of the devastated Ukraine—while the sound in the film consists of these intercepted phone calls. 

In Ukrainian, the film is called Myrni lyudy, which literally translates as Peaceful People. It is a clever, polysemic title that simultaneously addresses Ukrainian civilians embedded in their native wounded landscapes and Russian civilians calling their loved ones who are taking part in the invasion of Ukraine. Those people on the other end of the phone are fascinated by the soldiers’ detailed stories of war crimes and trophy theft and get very upset when their interlocutors become disillusioned with Russian propaganda. By placing the two sides of this war in the same audiovisual space, Karpovych makes a unique film about the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, allowing the aggressor to speak for themselves. By not showing the face of the speakers, the film creates the effect of a collective voice that, combined with the disturbing statics, metaphorically shows the whole Ukraine studying the propaganda narratives of its aggressor, which are striking in their diversity and scope. 

First screened at Berlinale, Intercepted has travelled to numerous festivals and political venues over the past year, including at IDFA in the Best of Fests section. Documentary spoke to Oksana Karpovych before the festival. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

DOCUMENTARY: You were developing another documentary film, but when the invasion broke out, you started to work as a producer with international reporters. Could you tell how you came up with the idea of Intercepted and how much your experience with news influenced your film? 

OKSANA KARPOVYCH: I had been working for a while on a project that was supposed to be filmed in Ukraine. It was in development, in research stage, but then the full-scale invasion began. From the very first day, I became a local producer for international media, working the longest with the English-speaking Al Jazeera. But it is not something I was interested in or had any experience with in the past. My choice to work with the journalists was made rather out of necessity. A lot of foreign journalists came to Ukraine and demanded help. I saw an opportunity to show my civil position in this role. Back then, it seemed the best thing I could do for Ukraine and its informational war. 

In general, my work with the media had not much to do with my work as a director, they were completely different functions that I performed. At the beginning of the invasion, two million people left Kyiv, but I made a choice to stay. I actively participated, observed, and felt that I just had to do something. My producers Giacomo Nudi and Rocio Barba Fuentes motivated me very much. They said that I should just keep doing what I was doing before the war—making films. It was difficult for many reasons but primarily because I didn’t have a clear idea of a project back then. Unlike many of my talented friends and colleagues, I don’t shoot first and then decide what to do with the material. I have to think about my idea three hundred times before I start. 

I had a rough understanding of what it could be visually. Of course, some of the things I witnessed and experienced while working with the journalists  influenced some of my creative decisions in the film. During my work as a producer, I spent time in the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions, both before and after the occupation. Around that time I started listening to intercepted calls posted regularly by SBU [Security Service of Ukraine]. I was disturbed by these conversations and quickly realized the potential of this material. Simultaneously, I continued to observe and survive the war, and, as a result, I began to experience a sort of cognitive dissonance. 

D: It is known that you listened to 31 hours of intercepted phone calls, taking them exclusively from open source. How did you adapt this material for film and how did the visual understanding emerge alongside this process?

OK: Yes, all the material I worked with was taken from YouTube. We spent some time cleaning it from the sound effects that the [Ukrainian] special services put on. The original recordings were accompanied by various “scary” sounds at the beginning and end of the clips. I listened to all of them many times, often with these effects. From my perspective, it was comical because I understood why the security services added those sound effects. In fact, I had to reappropriate these recordings and do the opposite of what the SBU did. I believe their original purpose was to shock and frighten the Russian audience. Also, most clips were super short, up to 2–3 minutes long. I wanted to make a feature-length film with them, to give these recordings a completely different life, to take away the comic connotations our secret services gave them by adding the sound effects. 

The visual approach was inspired by my experience living through the war. I associate the first weeks of the invasion with observing the aftermath of the Russian presence. We knew that minimalist static images were going to be our main approach, and that we should use long shots to give people a sense of space and time. 

D: Abstract statics with long shots and a large amount of audio sources, I suppose, might bring a lot of freedom in the editing room. What vectors did you use, did you rely on a certain timeline? 

OK: From the beginning we decided that the image and sound should not illustrate each other. I started editing by laying out the film on the wall. I printed and cut out all the main shots from our raw footage and just stuck them on the wall in an order I thought the visual narrative would develop. It was very intuitive. It is interesting that very little of the original structure changed over the six months of editing. 

The chronological structure was quite obvious, as we didn’t have many options. We started shooting in August and finished in October 2022, and couldn’t move those scenes around. And it’s not as much about the seasons but the chronology of the invasion itself. I will give you an example. When you see Ukrainian military vehicles with a white cross in the film—that indicates the counteroffensive that took place in the Kharkiv region in September 2022. This is a historical fact, a documentation that cannot be played around in editing. For our Western audiences who don’t know in-depth about the war, those details don’t matter. For me it is of the utmost importance, I know very well what phase of the war I am talking about. It was a unique period, everything before and after was different. 

Regarding the structure of the intercepts, we allowed ourselves a certain amount of freedom. We did not want to restrict ourselves to the chronological order of their appearance online. However, while editing the film, we realized that the story the intercepts were telling was naturally dramatic and logical in the chronological order. So we barely changed this order. 

D: I’m thinking of your previous film, Don’t Worry, the Doors Will Open (2019), which is similar to Intercepted in a way that both films have a road-movie aspect, with their constant internal motion. I am wondering if there was a geographical logic too? 

OK: There was, but it was a bit more complicated to build it in montage than the chronological development. It was more complex because to some regions we travelled several times. Part of the film was shot in the Kyiv region, part in the Mykolaiv region, the Kharkiv region and a little bit in the Donetsk region. After the Kharkiv counteroffensive we travelled  to places that had been occupied by the Russians for six months. That is why we return to the Kharkiv region in the film twice, at different stages of the war. It was important for me to show a certain geographical movement of the invasion, which stretches over large areas of the country. 

D: Intercepted is a unique Ukrainian documentary about a full-scale invasion, not only because it doesn’t show the violence, but because of the way audio and video material interact with each other. This chronological aspect and the complex logic inside each component of the film, are not juxtaposing but creating a cause-and-effect relationship. 

OK: Yes, and it’s interesting because we used the word juxtaposition ourselves when we were pitching our film at the beginning. Then after the first screenings I understood that it was more about a cause-and-effect relationship. 

If I had to document another war in my life, I don’t think I would do it differently. It’s important to mention that this is our second collaboration with the cinematographer Christopher Nunn. I can’t underestimate the importance of his role to the visual and ethical approach to our film. Not to show any violence was our joint decision, otherwise it would not have been about us. We can not interfere in other people’s grief and we prefer not to film people in their most vulnerable states. Filming people in tears isn’t about us as artists, it’s not about us as people, and it has nothing to do with any external factors. It’s about our personal philosophy, not the morals of the society or media. 

D: I also like the fact that you didn’t just focus on the biggest gesture in those calls, but you selected something that would give the broader context of nature and the diversity of Russian propaganda. In particular, I’m talking about the recurring moments when soldiers recall their experiences in Chechnya or Syria, while among the interlocutors we hear mostly women. 

OK: I focused on what seemed to me the most important and valuable for understanding this war. Indeed it was possible to make completely different choices, because the material is rich and it allows doing that. There were a lot of stories and recurring narratives that unfortunately we could not include into the film. It was crucial for me to remain objective and expose different thoughts, to emphasise their diversity. 

The conversations of the soldiers with the women were genuinely disturbing. There are definitely things that horrify: the dehumanization and fascination of the Russians. Perhaps it’s a bit of my personal expectation of women to be somehow empathetic. However, we don’t observe this in the phone calls that I listened to, and I don’t know why. Apart from my understanding that in Russia people are completely detached from reality, history, facts and consume lots of propaganda from television, I don’t have another explanation why they are so cruel. 

Sonya Vseliubska is a Ukrainian film journalist based in London. She is a staff writer for Ukrainska Pravda, the leading online newspaper in the country. Sonya’s writings on film have also been featured in Modern Times Review, Talking Shorts, Kyiv Independent, and Klassiki Journal, among others.