“Working with Emptiness”: Oleksiy Radynski Discusses His CCTV Chornobyl Doc ‘Special Operation’

Oleksiy Radynski is one of the most fascinating figures in contemporary Ukrainian cinema. He studied culture at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, developing an interest in philosophy and film. In the 2000s, he wrote criticism, including a memorable interview with the renowned director Kira Muratova. His first steps in directing came after taking Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann’s “Single Shot” workshop. Farocki’s philosophical approach to filmmaking and demonstration that impactful documentary cinema does not require vast budgets or complex technology deeply influenced Radynski.

Since his early shorts, Radynski has worked in observational documentary and archival footage. In films like his feature-length debut Infinity According to Florian (2022), he explores culture, historical memory, and community, particularly within Kyiv’s urban landscapes. The full-scale invasion shifted Radynski’s focus more decisively towards found footage, as he became increasingly engaged in the recovery of previously forgotten Ukrainian cinema. Radynski and his fellow Kinotron Group collective members got access to the dusty celluloids of Kyivnaukfilm studio and are now restoring and digitizing them. One of their resulting short films, Where Russia Ends, an essayistic archival short documentary that explores Russian imperialism, is now traveling the festival circuit worldwide and was just screened at IFFR. (IFFR also screened another golden find from Kyivnaukfilm, S. Parajanov. Delayed Premiere, a short documentary by Yuri Repik about an unfinished film by Sergei Parajanov, which was considered lost.) 

In parallel with the Kinotron Group films, Radynski makes documentaries about war, mostly concentrating on the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, he made Chornobyl 22 (2023), a short about the Russian occupation of a power plant, threatening the world with a nuclear catastrophe. His second full-length documentary Special Operation is entirely composed of CCTV footage, capturing the full chronology of the Chornobyl occupation. The film premiered in the Forum Expanded section of the Berlinale, and is heading next to the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival. Ahead of its world premiere, Documentary spoke with Radynski about Special Operation’s challenging production, the semiotics of surveillance cameras, and the depiction of imperialism through landscapes. This interview has been edited.

DOCUMENTARY: Among all contemporary Ukrainian directors, you have focused the most on Chornobyl. Where does this obsession come from? What connection does Special Operation have with your short Chornobyl 22?

OLEKSIY RADYNSKI: I often wonder where it all comes from, and I’m not sure I have an answer. It started a long time ago. I visited Chornobyl for the first time in 2006, and I’ve been trying to go back whenever possible ever since, so I’ve been there quite a lot. A few years before the invasion, together with my friend Svitlana Matviyenko and my partner and producer Lyuba Knorozok, we started thinking about a film in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. Svitlana studies Chornobyl and how this disaster affected science and our perception of the world. Lyuba and I accompanied Svitlana on her research and we were supposed to start filming in 2022.

With the beginning of the full-scale invasion, many historical events unfolded simultaneously and the occupation of the Chornobyl was easy to overlook in the midst of other terrible news. Since we were already connected to the Zone, almost immediately after de-occupation, I decided to document the consequences of the Russian military presence there. That’s how I got involved in “The Reckoning Project”—which deals with documentation of Russian war crimes in Ukraine. We first contacted people who had survived the occupation and began recording their testimonies on the Chornobyl Plant. My primary focus within it became the occupation of Chornobyl, as an unprecedented war crime and an act of nuclear terror. This led to the making of Chornobyl 22.

It was clear that there was no point in stopping at one short film. Also, Chornobyl is a place where many portals open in different directions at once, and it is quite addictive. So in those interviews, some of the workers told us that during the occupation, they operated surveillance cameras. At great risk to their own lives, they filmed and backed up these recordings. 

D: Special Operation was released only three years after the invasion, and I assume it has to do something with access to the footage. What did this process look like?

OR: When I heard about the existence of these CCTV recordings, I was super interested. It took us about a year to get the footage and start working. It was a rough journey through numerous bureaucratic institutions and law enforcement agencies. I went to the prosecutor’s office as if it were a job, because at first I was only allowed to study the material in their office and on their computers.

Special Operation exists thanks to my colleagues from “The Reckoning Project,” who managed to convince the Office of the Prosecutor General that we needed this footage. Throughout this year, I talked to various law enforcement agencies, who passed these materials around because no one knew what to do with them. In fact, they didn’t have much use for them. All the faces, whether of high-ranking officers or representatives of Rosatom, have already been identified. The prosecutor’s office told us that this is an unprecedented case, because they shared materials that are still part of an active criminal investigation. 

D: Let’s move on to the creative process. You show the chronological timeline of the occupation, and you successfully build suspense by gradually introducing different cameras. To what extent were the film’s artistic ideas shaped by the limitations of the material?

OR: As often happens with found footage, we had a limited amount of material, and this is especially true in this film. Cameras just shot what they shot and we had to work hard to turn this from a disadvantage into an advantage. 

The most interesting thing for me is that the cameras didn’t really capture any spectacular action, apart from a few exceptional episodes. In a sense, this is a material where we work with emptiness, with war as an extreme form of stupidity that crystallizes this emptiness in military routine. I love that the film contradicts all expectations about the Russian occupation of Chornobyl. It sounds like something potentially saturated with sensational material, which, let’s be honest, is absent in my film. The Russians don’t turn into mutants, they don’t climb into the destroyed atomic reactor. They do nothing. They are at the rear of the front and we hardly see any military action, just dull boredom.

What made this film possible was the diligent work of the CCTV operators. Not knowing if anyone would ever see this material, they captured the key dramatic points, the full arc of the story with a beginning, middle, and end. 

D: I’m pondering the semiotic power of CCTVs. For instance, its natural top shot/high angle automatically enriches what’s depicted with a strong sense of misery. Have you found yourself in situations where the natural visual language of cameras formed the meanings of the film?

OR: In our case, the video surveillance system creates a paradoxical situation: We are observing the observers. That is, the occupiers came, took this station hostage, and also took hostage the people through whose eyes we watch this. But the Russian soldiers, either through negligence or stupidity, did not prevent them from observing. It turns out that these hostages have a certain form of power over those who took them hostage. So it’s a film about gaze, power, and the power of gaze. 

In general, I always thought it would be a very slow, boring film. I think it turned out that way, and I’m genuinely surprised to hear the opposite. 

D: It seems that with this slowness, the film aims to convey the experience of occupation in a metaphysical way. Perhaps it also raises the question of what occupation is in general.

OR: Yes, and this was the plan—to put the audience in the experience of the occupation, to allow them to look at it through the eyes of people watching a stream that seems to be unfolding in real time. 

Of course, this is a metaphorical experience that cannot be compared to being under occupation in reality, but viewers, to some small extent, are imprisoned in this experience for 64 minutes. And I wanted to make viewers uncomfortable with the simple fact that you can’t do anything, you can only watch.

D: Would love to hear about your impressively detailed sound design. Did those cameras record any sound?

OR: The cameras only recorded images. Perhaps adding the sound is the only fully-fledged artistic decision on the part of the form that became the conceptual solution of the film. We worked with an outstanding sound designer, Volodya Golovnitski, a specialist in sound for archival films. For me, he is one of the best sound designers in the world, and as soon as it became clear that we were going to make this film, I immediately thought that he was the only person who could do it. He liked the material, and eventually he worked not only as a sound designer but as a supervisor with deep film knowledge who gave valuable tips for editing and the overall concept. 

D: In your blog, you once wrote that this is a film about the discreditation of the Russian army, and no one can discredit it better than the Russians themselves. Can you talk about this in the context of the film’s title, as it also refers to the Russian propagandistic description of the invasion? 

OR: This is a film not so much about what happened during the occupation of Chornobyl, but rather a film about the Russian army. The footage predominantly consists of very long shots, seemingly impartial and neutral, depicting Russian soldiers with all their problems in the army, which, by the way, turned out to be one of the most overrated armies in the world. Until recently, it was an army that was almost completely incapable of conducting serious combat operations. Of course, this does not justify all the crimes they committed, but in early 2022 they were so incompetent. In my film, we clearly see that these people are not ready to fight. 

D: I’m thinking about your monumental work with the Kyinaukfilm archive alongside Special Operation. In both projects, you adopt the role of an observer, which demands an additional layer of interpretation and analysis when engaging with these materials. What connections do these two projects hold for you?

OR: On an obvious level, it’s found footage, which I’ve actually worked with a lot. On a less obvious level, it’s the analysis of Russian colonialism, imperialism, militarism, and other expressions of the evil state. 

When I think about the unifying aspect of all this, I would say that I am interested in cinema as a form of working with landscape. Special Operation is a landscape film that is largely based on almost empty sceneries. The materials we work with in the Kyivnaukfilm archive are also about landscapes and their transformation, what the landscape says to us, and how the empire manifests itself through the landscape. Infinity According to Florian was also a film about a certain landscape and its infrastructural change. And that is exactly what I am most interested in.

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.