Ukraine one year on, with film-maker Nadia Parfan

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Ukraine one year on, with film-maker Nadia Parfan’

Lilah Raptopoulos
Imagine being in the middle of a war and still making art. There are artists right now in Ukraine who are doing that every day. This week, which marks exactly one year since Russia invaded Ukraine, at least four Ukrainian films are on screen at the Berlin Film Festival, and it’s been like that all year. A number of Ukrainian movies were also at Sundance. At the Venice Biennale, there was a special pavilion specifically for a lot of Ukrainian art. Most of these artists making work in Ukraine are not on the front lines, but that doesn’t mean their lives are business as usual. Far from it.

Nadia Parfan
It’s very different at the frontline and in the other areas. But both are unsafe and both are dangerous just in different ways because at the frontline you can die as the soldier. But in Kyiv, you can die as a kid, as a pregnant woman, as somebody who was just home, you know, taking a shower, and then something fell on their building.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s Nadia Parfan, one of the four Ukrainian filmmakers currently showing work in Berlin. She lives in Kyiv. Nadia recently put out a documentary short on The New Yorker called I Did Not Want to Make a War Film. It’s a personal essay about how her everyday life has changed.

[CLIP FROM ‘I DID NOT WANT TO MAKE A WAR FILM’ PLAYING]

Nadia Parfan
My name is Nadia. I’m from Ukraine. Back home, winters are dark and cold. I prefer to escape somewhere warm and return in the spring when life wakes up again. This year was different.

Lilah Raptopoulos
The film documents Nadia returning to Kyiv from her winter getaway after the war breaks out. And there’s a dissonance in it that’s quite emotional. Parts of the film show a country that’s clearly ravaged by war — bombed out streets, people displaced by fighting. But other parts show kind of normal life. Nadia at home tending to her plants, hanging out with her husband. Scenes that could have been filmed in Warsaw or London or a hip part of Brooklyn.

Nadia Parfan
If your country is at war, and even if you’re in a very safe place, it’s never safe. And I wanted to make a sort of hipster picture to show some Williamsburg hipsters like myself who also like vinyl music and who also make films and who also like plants and who like to stay at home and who have their favourite sofa and, you know, these little bourgeois things. I just wanted to show that there is not a single person and not a single social layer that remains untouched by the war.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
This week we spend the whole episode talking with Nadia to hear what it’s like to live and make work during a war. Because often I think we think of war as like their old black-and-white movies. But Nadia’s film shows us what war looks like today, and what it looks like today is familiar. This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos. Before I get into my conversation with Nadia, I’m going to tell you a few things you may already know. Russia attacked Ukraine exactly a year ago today on February 24th, 2022.

[AUDIO CLIP OF MILITARY PLANES FLYING OVERHEAD]

At first, Putin was trying to capture the capital, Kyiv, and quickly win the war. But that didn’t work. So in the time since, the Russian military has had to stick to the south and the east of the country, that’s the front line, the part where there’s active land based fighting. Everywhere else in Ukraine isn’t under active siege, but there has been shelling. So people are living and going to work knowing that they could be bombed. These bombs have also damaged Ukrainian infrastructure like power stations, which means that to conserve energy, the government implements rolling blackouts. Every week, people actually get a schedule of when their power will probably be out. Nadia. Hi. Thank you so much for taking the time out to join us.

Nadia Parfan
Hello, everyone.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So you are in a coffee shop currently speaking with us. Can you tell me what your current set-up is?

Nadia Parfan
Oh, I’m in a very funny place. It’s like a storage room in a café, which I call my office café. And that’s the place where I go to work sometimes and meet with my colleagues. But also, it’s a place I attend when there is no power and no internet at my place, which unfortunately happens very often lately.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. When we were setting this up, you sent us the times this week that the power would be out in Kyiv. And it was very striking to us. But I imagine it’s become sort of a normal thing for you these days. What is it like?

Nadia Parfan
You know, it’s a normal thing, but it can never be a normal thing and you can never get used to it, first of all, because the schedule and the situation is very dynamic and it changes literally every week and sometimes every day. So this is all like the it’s very smart how the communal services, how the city and how will these heroic workers of the communal services are managing this. And I really find them my heroes, heroes of our time. And they try to make it a little less horrible by giving you an approximate schedule. But you cannot get used to this, of course.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, I can imagine. Can you tell me where you were when the war started and what the arc has been like for you over this past year? Physically.

Nadia Parfan
On February 5th, ’22. I flew to Dahab in the Middle East. I was wearing my sandals and my plan was to have a workcation. And it’s . . . the reason I go there is because it’s cheap. You can just rent a place and live there and it’s in the same timezone. So it’s convenient to to do things in Ukraine. And I was supposed to work on my fiction script. I had to do some heavy writing and I wanted to focus, which is sometimes hard in Kyiv.

Lilah Raptopoulos
There was talk about a build-up of Russian troops at the Ukrainian border, but Nadia didn’t take it seriously. Until February 24th when the unthinkable happened. Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. Nadia’s first reaction, like many, was shock. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t figure out what she was supposed to do, especially being so far from her family. But then, about three weeks in, something shifted. Her body got used to it as her new reality.

Nadia Parfan
During the first weeks, it was three weeks sharp. I was in a state of shock and pain and suffering and being furious. And it was like, really, really bad. I think for every Ukrainian and also with insomnia. And it’s a level of stress that that’s even hard to describe. All kinds of things that you feel. And then suddenly on the 21st day, it changed. And I think it says often in the neuroscience that a human brain takes three weeks to develop a habit. And that’s exactly what happened to me, that suddenly I just woke up and I was a different person. I think I came to some kind of acceptance.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That night was the first time Nadia slept since the war began. And she had a dream which gave her clarity.

Nadia Parfan
And it was exactly as it is in the film that I saw a road. And it was a pleasant dream. You know, I was dreaming, like, nicely, joyfully, and just enjoying the road, perhaps this image. And also inside my dream, it was a road movie. And I woke up and I’m like, Hmm. Two points. One, this is the road home. I think I know what to do. I think I just should go home no matter what. Because I suffer being outside, being and being safe. But being isolated, torn out of my country, my place, my home, my people. And secondly, it’s a road movie. It’s a film. And I want to see this film. So I have to make it to be able to see it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
All of this is in Nadia’s movie. But what isn’t in the movie is what happened next, which is the path that brought her back home. First, Nadia asked her friends to figure out how to send her camera equipment to Dahab so she could start making this film. They did it, but they couldn’t send her sound gear, which limited what she could do. Then she tried to book a flight back to a war zone.

Nadia Parfan
And I flew eventually through Vienna and then travelled by train through many countries.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And you said that you were one of the only people going in the opposite direction?

Nadia Parfan
Yeah, yeah. At that moment, very few people were coming back.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’m curious, creatively. What did you know you wanted to get as you were travelling? Did you just think, Let me get what I see?

Nadia Parfan
It was quite intuitive. And the one liberating thing about this whole experience was that it was I know it’s going to be anti perfectionistic. I didn’t even know if it’s going to be a film in a professional sense. Yes, I’m a film-maker. Yes, I’m a film director. But normally it’s not how it works. I develop a film, I write, I talk, I pitch it, I find money, I develop a visual concept. There is this whole workflow of the production. And in this case, I knew this is not going to happen and it’s going to be a very different film and I let it be the way it was and the way it unfolds, and it was quite spontaneous and intuitive. It’s more a diary, an essay. So I just I took it very easy.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. To me, the scenes that are the most powerful in Nadia’s film are the ones set in Ukraine, just as she’s arriving to the country. Her first stop is her grandmother’s house in the west. You see Nadia reunite with her cousin who shows her how he hides his new gun under his jacket. There’s a scene of Nadia holding it too.

[AUDIO CLIP FROM ‘I DID NOT WANT TO MAKE A WAR FILM’ PLAYING]

Nadia Parfan
The most peaceful guy on earth. He got himself a gun.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Then one by one, Nadia brings out all the people who found refuge in her grandmother’s house. They’re 11 in total and two cats.

Nadia Parfan
Yvonne. Carter. Anton. Andrusha. Oksana. Natasha.

Lilah Raptopoulos
The scene is kind of confusing because it’s warm and cosy like a family portrait. But it’s also awful because all these people should be in their homes. I was particularly moved to see you return home and to see this close up version of what was sort of your new life. The juxtaposition between how modern and relatable all of the people in your film are like you and your friend FaceTiming and your grandmother and the people that she took in and your brother. And then how medieval the war is and I’m curious sort of what you were hoping to show.

Nadia Parfan
I think I was . . . my idea here was that home is very valuable. This now sounds so banal, so trivial. But before the Russian invasion, I didn’t value it, and I just suddenly realised that I’m so rooted in the place and these everyday things like being able to sleep in your bed, you know, literally every day I go to bed and I’m so grateful that this is my bed. These are my linens, my little pillow.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right, right. Nadia, by the end of your film, the word normalised feels wrong here, but the war feels, it feels that you’re used to it. You and your partner hear bombs outside and you drag your mattress into the hallway like it’s second nature. And you kind of got to go around your mattress to get into the bathroom. And it’s just life.

Nadia Parfan
Exactly.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Can you tell me about that?

Nadia Parfan
You know, is this strange combination of something being. As abnormal as it can be. I actually think that I might never, ever experience anything as abnormal as what we’re living through now. And this is I mean, I fantasise or I have rich and like active imagination, but I could never imagine this. And sometimes, you know, you think, oh my god, what else can be there? And then something else happens and yet something else. So it’s really crazy. But at the same time as humans, we’re . . . It’s our nature that we adapt. And I think we’re just very human because we need to live.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Nadia, I know your life is full of these probably, but can you just give me an example of something you deal with in your everyday life that would have seemed impossible before? Just to help people visualise.

Nadia Parfan
This year for the new year, I decided I’m going to stay home because it’s important. It’s the year of home. The year of me rethinking the relationship of home with my home and I invited whoever was around. I said, “Look guys, you can just come and stay. And important thing, we have the curfew, so everyone has to be home at 11.” And we were like, OK, we have to take care of people’s safety. It would be really stupid if 30 people die at our place in the New Years because of stupid Russians. So we go, we check our bomb shelter and we instruct everyone, please come and bring your mats, your sleeping bags. And if you are staying overnight in this house, the rule is that we go to the bomb shelter. And this is exactly what happened. My friend arrives like shortly before 11. We open some champagne. We try to celebrate the fact that we are alive. We’ll try to make a toast to our army to remember those who passed away and who are no longer with us among our friends. Because unfortunately, there are many under the mattress here, the window shaking. And everybody is very sweet and obedient. Everybody takes their backpacks, some tangerines, a bottle of champagne, and we just go to the metro station and we stay there for the entire night with some people sleeping, some people singing. Then, you know, this is the everyday life now in Kyiv, and I can’t get used to this. It breaks my heart and I suffer every time I’m this complaining Ukrainian sometimes. But other people, they are just grateful that they are alive and that they have homes and they just leave it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Nadia, how do you process something that puts this much stress on you and everyone in your community, on your bodies, on your minds and your emotional states while it’s still happening, like, are you using art to process it? Are you struggling to make art?

Nadia Parfan
I don’t call it art. I would just say work. And I honestly, I don’t distinguish much between creative work and other kinds of work. And so I just work. And honestly, I’m a lazy person. But this is what helps me because working gives you routines and it distracts you if you’re busy thinking your hands are busy doing. And I work a lot.

Lilah Raptopoulos
My last question, Nadia, and thank you so much again for your time, is you said this is the year for you of home. What are you thinking about this year? What are you working on this year? What’s in your mind?

Nadia Parfan
You know, I’m not making any plans anymore. And like, oh, horizons of planning are very short. Once I received this invitation for an event in Germany in, like three months or so, and it was so specific, it had a day, the time, and they would ask me if I can confirm and preferably immediately, I was really laughing because, you know, we don’t have these horizons in Ukraine and we don’t make any plans. So my plan is just, yeah, like very adaptive or agile. I don’t make any plans. My plan is to survive, to be where I’m needed, to try to help where I can. And this is already very ambitious.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Nadia, we’re so grateful for your time and your work and your thoughts. So thank you. And please stay safe.

Nadia Parfan
Thank you so much.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the podcast from the Financial Times. I’ve put a link to I Did Not Want to Make a War Film in the show notes alongside a number of excellent FT weekend pieces that are reflecting on the war this week. You can email us to say hi any time at the weekendpodcast@FT.com. The show is on Twitter at @FTWeekend Pod, and I’m on Instagram and Twitter, but mostly Instagram @LilahRap. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my talented team, Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smith is our producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of Audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a relaxing weekend and we’ll find each other again next week.