War Outlasts the Sound of Gunfire: An Interview with Mila Teshaieva

The documentary Shards of Light (Уламки світла, 2025) by Ukrainian artist-director Mila Teshaieva and German director, screenwriter, and cinematographer Marcus Lenz was presented in the National Documentary Competition at the 16th Odesa International Film Festival. The film continues the stories of five protagonists from their earlier work, When Spring Came to Bucha (Коли весна прийшла в Бучу, 2022), shot in early 2022 immediately after the liberation of the city from Russian troops.

It is a film about searching for the end of a war that has touched each of its protagonists: Liudmyla’s house was destroyed; Alla’s husband was killed; Olha was accused of treason; Taras has been separated from his family, who moved abroad; and Ania’s husband — whom she had just married — is fighting on one of the hottest frontlines.

Each of them would like to leave the war behind, yet the war does not let go so easily: Liudmyla’s house is being rebuilt, but very slowly; the killer of Alla’s husband has been identified and is being tried in absentia, yet the proceedings have dragged on for years and still aren’t over; Taras’s family remains abroad and now speaks French among themselves; Ania keeps waiting for her husband to return from each mission, not knowing how many more there will be.

In conversation with FIPRESCI, Teshaieva explains what compelled her to return to deoccupied Bucha, and how a prolonged war has marked both her protagonists and herself.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Your previous film, When Spring Came to Bucha, was shot in the spring of 2022, right after the city was liberated. It is a kind of zero-hour testimony — a cast of the catastrophe of occupation. How did the idea arise to return to Bucha and make a new, longer project?

Mila Teshaieva: I still haven’t fully processed how we made the first film. It was pure improvisation, Marcus and I went there and simply started shooting. We had no support at all, but I had a camera, and we made the film with our own funds. Somehow, we edited it in two months, whereas Shards of Light took us almost a year to cut.

And yet the film [When Spring Came to Bucha — editor’s note] came out and was shown at about forty festivals worldwide. It really was that first testimony, but not a journalistic one. For me, it bore witness to life overcoming death. That was crucial.

We finished the film in 2022, but I stayed in touch with our protagonists. What happened to them felt like the beginning of a new story. In the first month after Bucha’s liberation, you could feel spring, human solidarity, restraint — that quiet, stubborn confidence that we would be all right. In the second half of 2022, after the first attacks on the power grid, came the realisation that this was for the long haul, that the darkness of war was seeping into us and gradually starting to erode us. The first conflicts appeared in society and, as you know, have only deepened over the last three years. Cracks opened in solidarity, in trust, and in our protagonists’ lives.

If the previous film was my first emotional reaction, then Shards of Light was a subject I consciously chose to explore — as an artist and as a person. It is about the long-term consequences and fault lines in society that war brings. As our protagonists’ stories evolved, it became clear we had to continue.

Although, to be honest, I didn’t have the strength to go on. It came too soon, I hadn’t recovered yet, and I plunged into a second project. For the first year, we shot again with our own money. Later, we found international partners who supported us, and they kept telling us: “You have to film this — these are important stories that we don’t know.”

I’d like to delve into those social conflicts you mentioned, which intensify as the war drags on. There are obvious pressure points — injustice, for instance. One of your protagonists, a soldier home on a brief leave, talks about the sense of unfairness when people here live peaceful lives. He says it’s right, that’s what they are fighting for, but at the same time, people shouldn’t forget the price at which that peace is won. He feels many have forgotten, or don’t fully understand the sacrifice he and his family are making. Then there are less obvious issues, like the accusation of collaboration levelled at one of your heroines. Did you plan to highlight all these conflicts from the outset, or were some of them unexpected for you as well?

I didn’t intentionally seek out these conflicts. I was filming the lives of the protagonists from the first film and had absolutely no expectation, for example, that the neighbours who lived through the occupation with Olha would slander her. I couldn’t have imagined that a single denunciation from a neighbour could bring the Security Service into her apartment — everyone forced to the floor, belongings taken — and that you could spend years trying to clear your name.

I hadn’t planned to explore the topic of collaborators. I couldn’t foresee that something like this could unfold in our society in late 2022. Now I know there are 5 to 6000 open cases on alleged collaboration, and it’s a subject no one wants to discuss — how can one be a collaborator when a sacred war is underway? But who is a collaborator? Is someone who stayed under occupation and, at gunpoint, did what they were told a collaborator?

Likewise, I had no idea Taras’s family wouldn’t return to Ukraine, and that he wouldn’t be able to travel to see them for three years. I also assumed the trial of the Russian soldier who killed Alla’s husband — once he had been identified — would end in six months, yet it has been going on for two and a half years.

I was searching for what I felt inside — a longing for at least some measure of justice in a world splintering into shards. Not only are homes destroyed and people killed, but everything we lived for and believed in is crumbling, and people try to gather the pieces because they need something to hold on to. I think faith in justice is one such pillar. But the thing is, during war, it is almost impossible to achieve, there is no justice in war, no happiness, no way out.

I wouldn’t call myself an optimist, but I always try to look for light at the end of the tunnel. Over the two and a half years I was filming and editing this project, I came to feel that I was making a film that shows it is impossible to fit these shards back together. You can rebuild a house, but you will live in it alone, because your husband was killed by the Russians.

That is one of the revelations I drew from your film. You show the stories of different people marked by war, and it releases no one. What revelations did you have over the course of this long observation?

I was struck by how sharply conflicts in our society escalated. In late 2022 and early 2023, I took the wave of aggression and curses people hurled at each other over any trifle very hard. For example, when people wished for Andrei Kurkov’s death simply because he appeared on a panel with Masha Gessen. It was unbearably painful to see the solidarity of the early months vanish. It hurt so much I didn’t know how to cope. Acceptance came later, and I realised this aggression, this hatred people pour onto one another, is the result of pain. It’s what the war has done to us, we are not to blame for it. And it’s normal: every society that has been through war has been through this.

Shards of Light and When Spring Came to Bucha feel to me like a diptych — a cast of a country maimed by war. The occupiers have been driven out, buildings and bridges are being rebuilt, life seems to be returning. Yet the longer the war lasts, the more it eats away at society. This dissonance between external restoration and internal corrosion reminded me of Valentyn Vasyanovych’s films. He has already made two features about how, after a war, life can become even harder than it is now, as social consolidation weakens and the war’s consequences do not disappear. How we will continue to live with this remains unclear. I sensed a similar heaviness in your film. Near the end, there are scenes of schoolchildren rehearsing a play and their graduation dance. They are luminous moments that offer hope. Yet you ended the film with a scene of little boys learning to search for mines with a prodding rod.

I fought a real battle to end the film with that scene. My co-director, Marcus Lenz, our co-producers, our German distributor, everyone suggested finishing with a life-affirming finale of children learning to waltz. But it was absolutely clear to me that I could not put my name to a film that ended that way. Not now, not today. When the country is bleeding out, when we are losing people, land, hope. Our country is being destroyed, our souls are being destroyed, and we don’t know what comes next. I’m sorry, a waltz?

For me, that scene is very, very important — the little boy in funny glasses, not a heroic man but a slight kid named Richard and that probe in his hands. It is, for me, a glance into the future. He is even younger than the high-schoolers learning to waltz. It will be the task of the next generation to take up the probe and keep prodding, clearing the land, clearing society, rebuilding, consolidating, to recreate the Ukraine we dream of. Whether we will manage it, whether we will have the tools, whether we will do it with that same old-fashioned probe — we’ll see.

Dmytro Sydorenko
©FIPRESCI 2025