The Russian war on Ukraine is one of the definitive, colossal horrors of our times. The shockwaves of the chaos, invasion, and violence are eclipsed only by the impunity with which entire cities were razed to the ground and ghastly images of overwrought, frantic people milling out from their homeland. Putin hasn’t been held accountable and served for these gargantuan crimes; the arrogance of the Russian government’s right to usurpation lies unchecked.
How long before Ukrainians get back a share of peace? What’s peace and happiness when your own home, family histories, and roots have to be abruptly forfeited and exploded into annihilation? Olha Zhurba’s “Songs of Slow Burning Earth” shifts away from scenes of carnage to focus on the aftermath, the shadow of violence on everyday living.
What happens to a place when violence wholly changes the face of it? Lives are ripped apart, the present hurled into complete precarity, and the future perilously unstable. The land lies riven with witness marks of what had been visited. There are shelling craters; the landscape bears the weight of desolation. We see houses and buildings desecrated, barely holding up. Places are emptied. A drift of melancholy and loss sweeps over cities and towns, ejecting people who are essentially scraping together a rudderless, unknown future.
The film begins with the earliest intimations of the war, as it rolled out of the blue, slamming itself at the Ukrainians wholly caught unawares in February 2022. Trepidation and panic spread like wildfire as the invasion swiftly stepped up in alarming force and magnitude. There are the trains we see, bursting at the seams with passengers scurrying to get out of their endangered domiciles. Families and old people mourn their lost homes and the all-encompassing uncertainty of rebuilding every bit of their lives from scratch.
The film’s structure reaps rich dividends. It opens just a few kilometers from the frontline of the war, scuttles farther and farther but also keeps returning to inveterate proximity. No matter how wide one zooms out, war is immediate, hooking its claws in deep. There’s no escape. Death and bereavement seep everywhere one turns. Calls to emergency services punctuate images of evacuees in an anxious, scattered huddle, desperate for a sign of hope despite an intimate awareness that there’s none in store.
The Russian occupation engenders a complete scramble. Any faith in restitution or life in Ukraine sans the threat of ruin vanishes. We see children play faux war games in the battered yards of their homes. They have witnessed and endured trauma of the kind that takes lifetimes to gauge and come to some terms with it. It never goes away, rather settles subliminally in a corner of one’s consciousness.
How does one even begin to comprehend the scale of the horror? It’s a bombardment on the most essential core of dignity itself; to sustain an emotionally intact response becomes nigh impossible. What’s necessary is a deep-set recognition of the sheer work it calls for, across rungs and demographics, to continually reassemble into a coherent reality a sensible recourse to brutality and destruction. The stakes involve everyone.
“Songs of Slow Burning Earth” critically wraps on a note with children and young adults whose dreams and actions are faint. Nevertheless, there is an available possibility of reconstruction in their clutch. Vital questions are raised: “Do we have the right to dream while Ukraine is at war?” Peace hinges on what and how one seeks to imagine and reimagine one’s home. Zhurba’s film is an unshakably important, endlessly resonant portrait of not just wartime dislocation but also a reassertion of one’s efforts and agency to mount a ladder out of it.
