Real

Original title: Real

Directed by: Oleh Sentsov

Length: 90 min.

Country: Ukraine

Year: 2024

Premiere: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2024 

Synopsis: 90 minutes of footage, accidentally recorded by Oleh Sentsov during his military service on the ukrainan frontline in Summer 2023.

RATING: 3/5

 

REVIEW

Real is a film that inevitably opens several points of debate, yet at the same time hardly justifies spending many words on it: it is definitely not a film that has an intentionality in its form and content, some more ingenerous commenters could consider it even ridiculous to call it a film at all. The content is very literally 90 minutes of a GoPro recording, that Sentsov claims to have done by accident and to have discovered only half a year later. If there was some color grading or work with the sound, it feels irrelevant to call it an intervention of sorts.

If Sentsov's claim is to be believed, however, and Real is indeed comprised of footage that neither the unaware cameraman (Sentsov, whose helmet had the camera strapped on), nor the other soldiers that are seen interacting in the film knew of, Real might be one of the very few documentaries that achieved an almost total, unfiltered rendition of reality: sure, the frame is determined by Sentsov's head movements, but without his knowledge (again, if we are to believe his account); the soldiers do not have the social anxiety that often comes into action when being recorded by a camera; the events unfold in an entirely uncontrolled fashion. Any documentary that is produced, written, researched before shooting, no matter how objective its author wants to be, will fall inevitably in a filtering of reality through the lenses of a subjective conscience: Real doesn't.

This does not mean that the content cannot be strumentalised, and the epilogue of the film does feature an implicit call to arms or to arms donations that can be hardly missed - even if Sentsov's frustrated interactions with an operations command that seems too distant and too unresponsive doesn't depict very propagandistically the ukrainan military's status. 

Real is almost more of a VR experience than a proper film, but it finds its place in a filmography of a filmmaker that has been constantly limited by countless determining factors and largely had a career in which accidents had a key role. It also does have the merit of showing the frontlines of the ukrainan war from a much closer and much less elegiastic perspective than many of the documentaries that have been screened worldwide since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. The only two other documentaries that manage to give such a perspective but distance themselves from the frontline are Sergei Loznitsa's The Invasion and Thomas Wolski and Piotr Pawlus' In Ukraine.