I Did Not Want to Make a War Film

At the start of 2022, Nadia Parfan (Heat Singers, VdR 2019) was working in Dahab, a village in the Sinai peninsula, writing a film script which she submitted on… February 22nd, just as Putin was delivering the speech that triggered the invasion of Ukraine two days later. The Kyiv-born director powerlessly looked on as the first bombings began: “Unlike my family, friends and colleagues, I was in a warm, safe place incredibly far from home. I was torn between what was happening inside me and what I saw on the outside. I could find no better solution than to leave and film my return to Ukraine”. In the form of a road movie, which Parfan refers to as a “travelogue”, I Did Not Want to Make a War Film chronicles the flow of refugees, her friends and family driven out by the Russian offensive who sought refuge with her grandmother, the devastation in Bucha…. In this way, she collects the tangible signs of the unprecedented, hitherto-unseen reality unfolding over the course of her journey: that of a country at war - hers.

Emmanuel Chicon