Filming War Without Showing It: An Interview with Zhanna Ozirna

Documentaries about the war in Ukraine abound. Yet fictional films addressing this conflict remain scarce. Perhaps they will multiply once the war ends, as often occurs with past conflicts. However, in her debut feature Honeymoon, which competed for the FIPRESCI Jury Prize section at the 31st IFF Art Film Košice, Zhanna Ozirna chooses not to wait, instead filming war amid its eye of the storm. She seizes this subject matter through a radical cinematic gesture: reducing war to an apartment, two bodies, waiting. Ozirna explores the mental states of civilians abruptly engulfed by invasion: denial of warning signs, shock, survival instinct, and that astonishing human capacity for adaptation in the face of inhumanity.

February 2022. North of Kyiv, in a tranquil residential town, Taras (Roman Lutskyi) and Olya (Irina Nirsha) have just moved into their first apartment. The setting is new, luminous, almost idyllic—a place still imbued with promises, plans, and a future to build. Yet in an instant, everything collapses. Explosions jolt the lovers awake. Russia has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The couple attempt to flee, but it is too late: Russian troops occupy their building, establishing headquarters. Taras and Olya find themselves trapped in their own apartment, severed from the world and without electricity, running water, network access, news from Kyiv and loved ones, or any means of escape. Danger is everywhere. The slightest sound, the tiniest movement, could betray their presence to the occupiers. Survival now demands disappearance, auto-erasure—literal dissolution into the walls of their cocoon-turned-prison.

Ozirna orchestrates a dual confinement: first, the cocoon lovingly built and shared with friends, where the hors champ holds unfinished discussions, pending decisions, and figures moving within an intimate, ordinary frame. When the invasion begins, space transforms—simultaneously shelter and dungeon. The nature of confinement shifts; paradoxically, the narrative rhythm accelerates through editing while the protagonists merely wait, enclosed within tightening walls. The visual hors champ of the film’s opening moments morphs into sonic hors champ: bomb blasts, detonations, occupiers’ shouts, an executed neighbor, a raped woman… The hors champ becomes a champ de bataille—a battlefield of horror.

Honeymoon relies on starkly pared-down mise-en-scène: two actors, a single set, sparse music, and omnipresent sonic tension. Every noise turns suspect; every silence vibrates with invasion’s rumble. Everything hinges on stifled sounds, exchanged glances, charged silences. The huis clos intensifies as the outside world—through the noise of reality—infiltrates the walls, rendering terror palpable. Claustrophobia is absolute.

During five days of hell, Taras and Olya traverse varying emotional strata: raw fear, rage, despair, yet also surges of tenderness and stubborn hope—anchored by a love tested but unbroken. The huis clos acts as a catalyst: the couple shifts from mundane routine to existential reckoning. What does it mean to love in a crumbling world? How do ordinary individuals sustain life’s momentum when History imposes its logic of destruction? Can one still speak of the future, of art, of planned exhibitions—Olya is an artist—when one finds oneself plunged into circumstances where only survival instinct and powerlessness remain?

Zhanna Ozirna does not film war from the outside, with its armies and grand man oeuvres: she films war within. Within bodies, minds, bated breath. She plunges us into asphyxiating emergency, where ordinary acts—washing, drinking, eating, speaking—become resistance. Every movement—crawling, filling bottles before water cuts, stockpiling candles in hidden rooms—inscribes a choreography of survival. Through simple gestures—a silent dance to exorcise dread or a poetic interlude when Olya, lying on the floor, caresses a sunbeam piercing through the window—the film sustains a subterranean tension. The camera does not explain: it accompanies, observes, entraps.

Actors Irina Nirsha and Roman Lutskyi shoulder the film physically and emotionally in remarkable symbiosis. They embody, with piercing authenticity, the pivot from fragile happiness to inner abyss—that lightning transition from new-life promise to acute awareness of frailty. Their frozen gestures, alert gazes, and restrained breaths weave the soundtrack of an occupied Ukraine. But their fear-strained relationship is also a refuge—a final space of humanity.

What could have veered into melodrama is averted by rigorous, precision-tooled direction. Ozirna sculpts her narrative without pathos, condescension, or didacticism. She captures the instant, the invisible, the unbearable wait. For a debut feature, Honeymoon asserts a potent directorial signature—filming without theorizing, yet with a clarity that pierces the screen to strike viewers with organic, almost physical intensity, achieving intimate and immediate resonance.  Honeymoon thus distinguishes itself by binding the intimate to the political, rendering a global collapse through a mere apartment, two beings, and waiting. Ozirna’s work is silent scream—a film of restrained intensity where fear and tenderness coexist in a besieged, enclosed space where love persists against all.

FIPRESCI: In this huis clos, there are two phases: the first, a short one where the four walls are a cocoon, and then, when the invasion begins, these walls become a prison. Your framing also changes according to these phases. What were the technical and dramaturgical challenges you faced? 

Ozirna: It’s an interesting question. Budget constraints forced us to be inventive. The film was financed by the Venice Film Festival’s special program Biennale College – Cinema with a strict €200,000 cap—we couldn’t exceed it. My solution was to use framing as a dramaturgical tool. Early on, the space feels open, colors are bright, conveying a sense of freedom. As tension builds, the framing tightens, and we shift to unconventional angles (for example, high shots when Olya struggles to recall beige paint gradients that they wanted to choose from for their walls). We matched the framing to the characters’ emotional states—starting classically, then fragmenting perspectives. 

At the end of the first three sequences, protagonists leave the frame while we hear them hors champ, the camera lingering on the spot they were. This creates a distinct atmosphere.

Exactly! With limited visual options, we leveraged framing and color. Everything was shot in a Kyiv studio where we rebuilt the apartment to control light and sound. Real apartments couldn’t accommodate our lighting transitions—from sunny days to twilight. Our production designer added a glass wall to amplify fragility and light play. We even widened doors for camera movement. 

You evoke war through sound rather than visuals—creating a universal effect (though clearly Russia attacking, this can perfectly resonate with someone experiencing the same thing elsewhere). Could you explain your work with the sound designer?

We recorded only clean dialogue on set. All war sounds—military aircraft, explosions—were added in post-production. Our sound designer collected authentic audio from conflict zones, often from documentary colleagues. We consulted military experts for precision: Ukrainians distinguish weapon-specific explosions. For the teaser, we’d used YouTube sounds; a soldier corrected us. 
And I had another concept. You know the song Love is in The Air? My idea was “evil is in the air.” Showing enemy faces leads to not being able to avoid this feeling that you want to understand them as a people; I wanted the threat hors champ, omnipresent, like an evil next door—like Russia, our eternal neighbor. You cannot avoid it. You can just fight back or hide.

For those unfamiliar with bombings, distinguishing explosion types isn’t obvious.

They vary drastically. After the teaser error, we sourced authentic sounds. In Ukraine, audiences fixate on accuracy: Was it right? Real? Their perspective shifts. 

Was screening the film in Ukraine difficult? 

Yes. Some argued the early “sunny” visuals were unrealistic—they wanted documentary-like gloom. But I needed contrast for the narrative, I had to fictionalize for the sake of the story. Everyone experiences war differently; everybody has their own version of reality. I know they wanted to all this to be very precise, but this is fiction, not reportage.   

Has Honeymoon been released in Ukraine? 

It premiered at the festival Molodist in Kyiv and releases theatrically next month.

But do you have also positive reactions?

We won the Grand Prix at Molodist! Festival feedback was strong, though wider audiences may react differently—I’m eager to engage them. 

How did you work with actors Roman Lutskyi and Irina Nirsha? Did you rehearse a lot to achieve this precise result, like a choreography?

I rehearsed extensively to understand who needed to be in the frame and how, in order to plan body placement, their movement, and the characters’ blocking.

They carry the film physically and emotionally. Was it a challenge for them and how did you achieve their chemistry? 

Chemistry was tricky: the fact that this was Irinas debut role contrasted with Roman’s more extensive experience [Once Upon a Time in Ukraine (Roman Perfilyev, 2020); Reflection (Valentyn Vasyanovych, 2021)]. Roman was absorbing everybody who was next to him: by the casting process, other actresses became submissive around his charisma. But the script demanded equality: the two protagonists have more or less the same number of scenes and equal lines. Irina held her ground—energetically competitive. Once, via their mics, I overheard them counting their scenes! I used that to create this chemistry; that rivalry fueled their dynamic: Roman almost quit during rehearsals; he saw his character as “weak” after playing heroic types of men.

But isn’t that an actor’s opportunity? 

Yes—and he understood it later, but not from the very beginning. Post-Venice premiere, he embraced its depth. Irina drew from staying in Kyiv during the invasion and visiting liberated towns like Bucha. Her experience felt visceral. Roman, from western Ukraine (Ivano-Frankivsk), had a different mentality but is a superb actor.

The editing is very interesting, with ellipse, clean and sharp cuts and also, at the film’s beginning,  more space created by the hors champs. Could you speak about this work?

The film explores collapsing time. Early on in the invasion—it was already March or April—we joked it was “the 58th of February.” Endless and disorienting, the sensation is that the time is behaving in different ways. Editing mirrors that trapped sensation: time drags yet races unpredictably. 

Did you edit Honeymoon yourself? 

With guidance from Venice and collaboration with filmmaker Philip Sotnychenko. The first version was a flashback version. Venice liked this, but it betrayed my vision. Occupation is monotonous dread—waiting without horizons. And I wanted to convey this feeling.

Most would use flashbacks for relief, yet you sustain the horrific week, contrasting it with the apartment’s dreamlike start. 

It was the main point of our discussion because Venice feared minimalism would bore audiences. They advised me to do this jump editing because it feels more kind of energetic or entertaining, but I refused to “entertain”. I chose linearity: war, as lived, is agonizing stillness. Flashbacks would break the huis clos claustrophobia. 

A discussion about art evolves throughout the film: at the beginning, it is a rather theoretical one accompanied with socio-philosophical references, then later on Olya gets into the reality of tangibles and this feeling of uselessness, of powerlessness. Can you talk about these diverse reflections on art?

Invasion shatters artistic purpose. Cinema’s slow creation feels insignificant amid missiles. Early on, painters made propaganda—art serving war. Later, we realized personal stories matter: people craved perspective beyond rubble. At a Honeymoon screening, a moderator asked, “Do you believe in cinema’s power?” Once simple, it’s now fraught. We can answer that we believe in the power of art, that cinema is a way of communication and translation of reality, that it builds empathy and creates some emotional bonds and connections—but it doesn’t fight. For that, you need drones and missiles.

Wars actually begin before the military engagement, with propaganda, including artistic propaganda. It’s an incredibly powerful tool. While perhaps not as effective for defense, it’s exceptionally potent for offense.

When it comes to art propaganda in general, it’s clear that, for example, Russian authorities understand its power very well, recognizing it as a highly influential tool. However, I believe the Ukrainian state underestimates it. They aren’t allocating any significant funds towards cinema or fiction films right now.

What was particularly tricky was that when the full-scale war began, many of our filmmakers were in danger, hiding, and had no money. As a result, people from abroad—who had access to cameras and funds—came and essentially used our filmmakers as fixers. The first year of the war was very strange because everyone else started telling the story of our war from their own perspectives, but we couldn’t tell our stories. It took a couple of years for the European Solidarity Fund for Ukrainian Films to become available, allowing us to finally get some money for production development. Only then could we start to reclaim our narratives. The state should fund this art, but missiles remain prioritized—rightly so. 

Taras exemplifies the dilemma of being a civilian and contemplating his role in the war effort.

This was particularly crucial in the initial years of the war, when everyone felt a strong desire to be involved and useful. The inspiration for this particular storyline came from a friend of mine. She was in Bucha during the occupation, stuck there with her parents. She shared with me the intense emotions she witnessed: her mother reacted in what seemed like an “inadequate” way, crying or behaving erratically. However, her father became completely frozen by the occupation. As a man, he felt an overwhelming sense of helplessness. Imagine having your daughter and wife with you, and Russian soldiers occupying your town. As a man, you feel utterly powerless; they could come and rape your wife, and you’d be forced to stand by. He remained in this state of total helplessness, not even knowing what would happen next. While women might be able to express their helplessness more openly, men often feel they cannot afford to show such vulnerability. I understand he was completely consumed by this feeling. My friend’s account made me realize there’s something very specific and interesting about male behavior during occupation. This is a  reality that we mirrored in the film. You can’t just invent an idea like that out of nowhere; you need to see real-life examples to truly understand it.

Malik Berkati
Edited by Jonathan Murray
©FIPRESCI 2025