Although the “real” war in Ukraine started relatively recently, immediately after the revolutionary events there in 2014, the Russian annexation of Crimea and the attempt by pro-Russian separatists to separate the Donbas provinces from Ukraine, real war activities began there. It was a kind of war before the war, about which until Putin ordered a general offensive against the southwestern neighbors and we did not have much opportunity to hear and read in the media, and the French journalist Loup Bureau went into the trenches in that turbulent time with a camera on his shoulder. He had earlier experiences in war and troubled areas and spent two months in a Turkish prison in 2017 for reporting on conflicts in that area and the conflict with the Kurds, and “Trenches” is his first documentary film.
The documentary shot (mostly) in black and white with a vertical image was premiered in Venice, and then at numerous world festivals, including at our ZagrebDox. The black and white technique and the archaic vertical image were probably chosen to give the viewer the impression that little has changed in a little more than a hundred years since the First World War, which was best known for similar trench battles. And the author should really be honored, because something like this requires courage and balls, and the Bureau spent several months in the trenches with Ukrainian soldiers. While shells are falling around their heads and they are being shot at, the author suffers the same fate, and “Trenches” follows the daily life of soldiers as they literally live in the trenches.
During the war, I held a shovel in my hands more than a weapon, one of the soldiers points out with a laugh as he and his colleagues dig new trenches in which they are buried, while on the other side, a few hundred meters away, as in the First World War, their enemies suffer the same fate . If you want to survive – dig, another soldier explains to the documentary maker in this observational documentary in which the author manages to capture the emotions of the soldiers he follows and who eventually open up to him completely. And it seems like a real Sisyphean job that has no end because the trenches have no end either, and the Bureau has chosen an observational approach in which it explains practically nothing about the war and what we see, but leaves the viewer to draw their own conclusions. Admittedly, we are listening to the thoughts and considerations of several soldiers and one female soldier, a woman in her forties who almost has the status of a mother to numerous children who are barely 20 years old.