The documentary When spring came to Bucha reaches beyond common representations of war and one-dimensional victimhood.

Immediately after the premiere of When spring came to Bucha, something remarkable happened. The filmmakers came to the stage as well-deserved applause filled the theater. And since this was at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), they had brought one of their protagonists with them: Taras Vyazovchenko. We had just seen him on screen: for many months he had worked inside refrigerators with bodies of killed Ukrainian civilians, identifying them, registering their wounds and the causes of death, trying to prepare them for a proper burial. When he came to the stage, IDFA’s moderator for the premiere suddenly fell into Vyazovchenko’s arms, crying and hugging him. She was shaking. The filmmakers stood by, a bit uncertain. Eventually the audience stood up and left.

Why was she so upset? The film had shown only an incidental tear, and no deep elaboration of the atrocities. Just once, very briefly, had a dead body been visible, carelessly lying on pavement. Even in the hardest scenes at the morgue, we’d only once seen a foot sticking out from under a body bag; death had not revealed itself any more.

Two teenage girls sit in a bedroom. One is knitting, the other is coloring a paint-by-numbers drawing and together they softly sing in harmony. Boom. The deep rumble of an explosion. They stiffen, their eyes go wide for a moment, and then they throw themselves back into their hobbies with extra concentration, while explaining to the filmmaker that it must be friendly fire. And anyway, « fear does not last long ».

A woman clears debris from the street and cuts the grass in front of a bombed house. She and her fellow remaining residents, complemented with volunteers, are performing community services.

The representation of war has a familiar idiom: images of projectiles in the air, victims bloodied and shocked, accounts of torture and executions. Not children singing, people cutting grass, unless they can be used in the sentimental dressing up of victimhood. War photography gravitates familiarly to the half-burned teddy bear and the empty children’s shoe. Spectacle and sentiment, that’s how war reaches an audience.

Dozens of journalists and politicians marched to Bucha, near Kyiv, on the 31st of March 2022, in the footsteps of Ukrainian soldiers, to report on what was taking place during the Russian occupation. Reports appeared of men being led away, corpses lying in the streets. Exhausted people recounted atrocities on camera, pointing out the locations where family members had been shot. The name Bucha spread rapidly across traditional and social media. « Bucha » came to signify less a place than a happening, the worst of war.

Such abstraction can convince us, certainly, of the wrongness of war, as if we needed convincing. But how far did it reflect the experience of the inhabitants of a town thirty kilometers from Kyiv, in early 2022?

The Ukrainian artist Mila Teshaieva also arrived, and began filming: soldiers hand out boxes of food, a traumatized woman tells them how scared she still is. Wherever the camera goes, you see destruction on a grand scale. Buildings, gas stations, roads: everything a rubble of concrete and iron. But when the camera arrives at places where the dead are collected, Teshaieva does not focus on corpses, nor on mourners and their tears. She mostly shows weary people lugging body bags and debris, cleaning, making soup for one another, listening, registering. And she comes back to them the next day, and the day after.

« It is very important to me. Yes. It is very important to me. » Mila sits at a café table. Half a year has passed, and she is in Amsterdam for IDFA, now in its 35th iteration — a festival, or better yet, an institution that takes over the city every autumn.

« No pity! » Days after the premiere, she gives me her account of it. « There are no crying people in our movie. It is complicated, I cannot explain, but I feel like pity is something on the border with indifference, and I don’t want you to be indifferent. Pity is… I want to come a little bit deeper inside you… Oh, I am sorry, maybe Marcus can help me? »

Mila, glass of beer in her hand, gestures at her collaborator Marcus Lenz, a German, on the other side of the table. That first day in Bucha she had called him: « Marcus, come, we need to make a movie. »

Marcus considers his thoughts: « Pity… hmm… We don’t want to evoke pity. We want to evoke the understanding of what this war is doing to people in their daily life. To feel pity is also to look from a higher perspective down on somebody. And we wanted to be with them. »

Civilians who have experienced or witnessed a crime gather in school classrooms at little tables. Soldiers and officials note down in unpracticed handwriting who has been attacked, robbed, killed — where and when. The movie follows several protagonists as they deal with the aftermath. Taras Vyazovchenko laboriously hoists himself many times into a white medical coverall jumpsuit, to process yet another refrigerated truck of bodies and investigate the injuries and causes of death. Every day. Examining, identifying, registering, answering family members. The community patiently digs yet another makeshift grave. Under the remnants of a bombed house, a mother and son lie waiting to be dug up. The residents, aided by volunteers, work and work. No relatives to be found? Take a DNA sample. The city council looks for money to buy crosses. A reburial, if possible, can be done later.

Mila and Marcus are not themselves present in the film; their camera just follows, listens, looks and watches. The project defied « planning ». No fixer was hired; Mila and Marcus went with the flow. They would not go to a mass grave by themselves. They’d just show up at places like the town hall, again and again, until people started to talk to them and show them around.

« How would you approach a woman who is crying at the grave of her son? » Mila reflects now, in Amsterdam. « Would you raise a camera and try to get as close as possible? Or would you comfort her, ask her what has happened? Then you walk with this woman back home, and you stay with her, and you get a connection. Through this connection you get a closeness, and then you have the ability to tell much more than just showing pictures of a crying lady at a grave. »

A group of volunteers removes debris from the remains of buildings. The footage resembles iconic black and white photographs of bombed German cities after World War II — but now the people in the frame, mostly women, come alive in color. At the end of the day the camera follows them home, and the viewer strolls along, beyond the frame of war’s standard representation, beyond « Bucha », to Bucha.

At one moment in the film, when we’re silently shown constructions of distorted iron and destructed concrete, I heard in my head the monotone and self-assured voice from Hiroshima mon amour (1959), saying: « Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima, rien. » In that film’s opening sequence (directed by Alain Resnais, screenplay by Marguerite Duras), two bodies hold and caress each other while being snowed over by ash. We then see documentary footage of a hospital and images of skin, hair, scars, twisted iron and more, when the camera wanders through the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Meanwhile, one of the two lovers, a French woman, recites supposed facts about what she saw visiting Hiroshima. She says she has been to the hospital: « I am sure, the hospital exists in Hiroshima », but her Japanese lover tells her she did not see the hospital in Hiroshima. He repeats: « Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima, rien. »

Hiroshima, another name detached from its geographical location, abstracted into something unspeakable that we cannot claim to have seen. I had not seen Bucha in the news; I had seen only the common representation of war.

Mila told me: « I think, how you behave in war: you are not thinking much. You are listening to your intuition. You are driven by your history, of maybe five thousand years, your ancestors are moving your body, they are moving your reactions. It is not only your life, it is a very animalistic thing. »

The « animalistic thing », in When spring came to Bucha is: coping and rebuilding.

A woman called Olga shows how a bomb blew her into her husband’s arms. She is making soup, just as she did during the occupation, without a kitchen. She visits a woman whose husband was shot to death. The widow shows Olga a video on her phone of that silly husband of hers, in his underpants in the snow, goofily pretending he’s bathing, rubbing snow under his armpits, like soap. Olga embraces the woman. Don’t cry, she says, « You lost your husband, but you found a new friend. I am going to visit you every day. »

On a square, in broad daylight, a wedding takes place, not long after Bucha’s liberation. The groom wears his soldier’s uniform. His regiment stands in line behind him. The bride wears a light-purple jogging suit. But they look as radiant as any bride and groom. After saying yes, they dance on the square, and the regiment sings for them, shouts some battle cries for Ukraine. In unison: « Russian warship: go fuck yourself. »

The Ukrainians he met displayed an astonishing sense of humor. He and Mila would travel daily from Kyiv to Bucha, and at every checkpoint some soldier or policeman would tell a joke. Marcus saw it as a form of dignity that he wanted to capture in the film.

In another scene, a rather absurd one, an American volunteer-cleaner video-calls with his girlfriend back home. He might be some sort of missionary: he prays loudly with her. But then he tells her about this ruined town, and says: « I want you to come here, I like it way better than where we live ». In the same breath he goes on to tell her, « Yesterday we found twenty bodies, all shot with their hands bound. » Markus: « Obviously he does not mean that massacres and death are beautiful. But he experiences this enormous solidarity within the society. »

Many scenes show the citizens of Bucha as resilient and admirable, yet When spring came to Bucha is not a feel-good documentary to be enjoyed from luxuriously safe distance. It does not resolve into a tale of new flowers planted in a village, nor the cartoon satisfaction of Asterix and Obelix defying Roman armies.

Rather, its power lies in digging deeper than the clichés of war representation and one-dimensional victimhood. A psychologist, present at the premiere, later told Marcus that it was a good thing for Taras Vyazovchenko when the presenter collapsed into his arms. It meant that he was not pitied. We, the audience, may still not have seen Bucha, but with their explorations, Mila and Marcus have done the rare thing that documentary can achieve.