I See No Death

synopsis

How is war changing as technology advances and part of the fighting is shifting to the screens of drone operators? The film follows a newly formed Ukrainian unmanned systems unit from its first deployment in the Donetsk region and on to operations on Russian territory. The daily lives of these modern-day warriors unfold in cold cellars and trenches, where destruction becomes a technical task and death is reduced to a few pixels on a monitor. They hardly ever see blood, yet the human casualties remain just as real. Their shifts are filled with computer games, black humour or looking after animals, yet the calm can be shattered at any moment by explosions and artillery fire. The film alternates between intimate portraits of individual men and observational depictions of their daily lives, combining the dynamics of a war film with an aesthetic reminiscent of a video game. Through a variety of cinematic techniques, it thus offers a comprehensive view of the technological transformation of modern warfare, in which physical distance from the enemy paradoxically coincides with the immediacy of the moment when, just before an attack, a man on screen looks directly into the lens of a drone.

“I saw blood, torn bodies, death – with my own eyes. But the war has changed. It has become more modern, more distant, something new.”

biography

Yevhen Titarenko (1988) is a Ukrainian film director, editor and cinematographer. Before the annexation of Crimea, he ran a production company and film school in Yalta. Since 2014, he has been working as a volunteer with the Hospitallers Medical Battalion, documenting the war directly from the front line. He is co-author of the documentary Eastern Front (2023), which premiered at the Berlinale.

film details

director:	Yevhen Titarenko
producer:	Nataliia Khazan, Guntis Trekteris

contact

Nataliia Khazan / BRAHA PRODUCTION COMPANY
5660161@gmail.com