Irina Nirsha

Documentaries about the war in Ukraine abound. Yet fictional films addressing this conflict remain scarce. Perhaps they will multiply once the war ends, as often occurs with past conflicts. However, in her debut feature Honeymoon (Medovye misiats),  Ukrainian filmmaker Zhanna Ozirna chooses not to wait, instead filming war amid its eye of the storm. She seizes this subject matter through a radical cinematic gesture: reducing war to an apartment, two bodies, waiting. Ozirna explores the mental states of civilians abruptly engulfed by invasion: denial of warning signs, shock, survival instinct, and that astonishing human capacity for adaptation in the face of inhumanity. (…)

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