Witnessing a Mutual Confession of a Protagonist and a Director: An Interview with Lesia Diak

Winner of a Special Jury Diploma in the National Documentary Competition at the 16th Odesa International Film Festival, documentary Dad’s Lullaby (Татова колискова, 2024) by Lesia Diak, invites viewers to witness a mutual confession: that of a Ukrainian soldier trying to rebuild his family relations after returning from the front, and that of a director processing a breakup with her boyfriend, a veteran of the Russian-Ukrainian war.

In 2018, Serhii returned to Kyiv from eastern Ukraine, where he had spent three years defending his country against Russia’s invasion. He carries invisible wounds that eat away at him from within and complicate his efforts to reconnect with his wife, Nadiia, and their three sons — eleven-year-old Sasha, eight-year-old Artem, and three-year-old Nikita.

Just when it seems that the film will be a story about rebuilding trust within a family, the camera turns toward the director. She steps into the narrative, and a delicate, vulnerable dialogue unfolds between her and the protagonist about love, pain, and the loneliness felt by those who have seen combat. As the director shares her own experience of a breakup with a veteran, she blurs the line between observation and participation in the tradition of cinéma vérité. Their mutual openness turns the film into an attempt at emotional reconciliation with the past and shows how documentary cinema can prompt viewers to reflect on the social isolation faced by veterans.

Born in Ukraine, Lesia Diak lives and works between Kyiv and Lisbon. She holds a degree in communications and earned an M.A. in documentary directing from the DocNomads program.Combining experience in producing, independent documentary, and social campaigns, she founded the production company DramaFree to champion auteur projects with a strong humanistic voice. Her previous short films have screened at international festivals, and Ukrainian-Romanian-Croatian co-production Dad’s Lullaby marks her feature debut.

In conversation with FIPRESCI, Diak spoke about how she achieved such candor from her subject, the difficulties of working with vulnerable people, her fear that the film might never materialize, and why she believes a director’s open stance has become essential in today’s documentary practice.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Your film starts at a brisk pace: the audience is immediately in a room with the protagonist as his children come to wake him up in the morning. It’s evident you’ve been with this family for some time, and the viewer enters a pre-established atmosphere of trust. So first I wanted to ask how you found your protagonist, Serhii, and how you built that atmosphere of trust?

In fact, I was looking for a veteran’s family, as the initial idea was to film how a family waits for a man to return from war. The NGO The Free People Employment Center was running adaptation training activities for veterans and their families. At one of those sessions they announced there was a director who wanted to make a film about a veteran’s or serviceman’s family, and Serhii’s wife responded to that call as her husband was still at the front then. When Serhii came home on leave, I said I had a mission to talk about what’s usually left unsaid — how hard it is to hold together relationships shaken by war — and that this was also my personal case, since my ex-boyfriend is a veteran as well. Serhii accepted my request, I think because he sensed how personally important it was to me.

Building a relationship with the family and with him took about six months. It was a meeting of different worlds: I came from a more stable environment, I had a job that allowed me to live, to shoot, to rent an apartment, and I didn’t have children to support and care for. Serhii’s family had it much harder. As the film shows, they live modestly in a small apartment, with many external pressures weighing on them.

They also had very few friends. Perhaps because it’s hard for people to bear. And back then, in 2017–2018 [Russia occupied Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014, after which an anti-terrorist operation began — editor’s note], not everyone was ready to engage with someone returning from war, to listen and adapt together.

Maybe because these two solitudes met, an understanding emerged between Serhii’s family and me. I often felt that neither my colleagues nor even my own parents understood me or what it means to be in a relationship with a veteran. With Serhii there was mutual empathy, not only mine as a director filming a veteran.

In documentary cinema, especially Ukrainian documentaries about the war and its consequences, we’re used to the camera being detached, merely observing, in a fly on the wall manner. Your approach is cinéma vérité: the director reflects openly, we see your emotions, and you interact with your subject. You mentioned mutual empathy with Serhii, and on screen we witness a kind of double confession: at a certain point the camera turns on you, and you too become a protagonist, sharing your experience of a traumatic breakup. When did that happen, who initiated it, and how did it change your concept for the film?

Some time into the shoot, Serhii began living apart from his family. He was in a prolonged depression and didn’t want to talk to anyone, including me. He wouldn’t pick up the phone. It was a turning point in my work, I had to literally go and knock on his door. It wasn’t easy, but I forced myself, because I wanted to go deeper and show his inner state. It became clear that with purely observational material I wouldn’t achieve that. I needed to have a conversation with him after he had left his family.

It was more of an intuitive decision, though I don’t even like the term intuitive directing, but it felt like, as a human being, I had to give him a voice and space. So when he said it was hard for him to be under the gaze of the camera, I asked whether it would be easier if he filmed me while we recorded our conversation. He agreed, because he obviously wanted to help me finish the film. It ended up being both considered and spontaneous.

In the edit, I decided to distribute these candid dialogues throughout the film to create a sense of what might come next. They function as a structural element. As for my presence on screen, when I was editing with editor Andrei Gorgan, I initially didn’t want to include shots with me, because I felt the focus had to remain on the main character and his relationships with his wife and children. But those shots worked as a way to reveal him more deeply. You know, when two people talk, a kind of mirroring appears — you can read one person’s emotions on the other’s face. The film’s editing works on those nuances. We were able to stitch together the fragments, when he filmed me and when I filmed him, almost seamlessly.

I believe it’s honest and fair for authors today to include themselves in the film and show their vulnerability. In documentary filmmaking we come very close to our subjects and immerse ourselves in their lives, which isn’t always ethically comfortable, for viewers either. It seemed to me I could balance the film’s ethics by opening up my own story, that I live with the consequences of depression after a breakup with a veteran. That is both more honest and broadens the issue: not only Serhii but many other veterans face similar crises in rebuilding relationships after returning from war. I had a similar problem: I didn’t know whether I could love again. It’s very hard, and it’s still ongoing.

Documentary filmmakers often face the ethical issue you mention. When filming people in difficult circumstances, who can’t always assert their boundaries, it’s hard to know whether they consent freely or simply have no choice. You said you literally knocked on the door of a person in depression who had said he didn’t want to continue filming. Were you afraid he might refuse at that moment and forbid you from using even the material already shot?

I think Serhii understood the value of the work, that others would watch it and discover something about themselves. I, for my part, extended trust by sharing my own story with him, because I felt he understood the mission of documentary cinema.

But of course, there is always a risk, because the path is nonlinear and our subjects’ lives change. When you’ve worked for years on a film, shot a lot of material, carried some of your protagonists’ burdens with them, and then they say, fully within their rights, that they don’t want the film to come out now, or at all — it’s painful; it feels like a loss. I know such cases, when protagonists refused and films were never released. As documentarians, we must be prepared for that.

Serhii, for example, didn’t attend the Ukrainian premiere of the film. Clearly, he didn’t feel ready to face an audience. Viewers may accept and understand a protagonist, or judge him. I think Serhii wasn’t ready to confront others’ evaluation of him. Time has to pass before he dares watch the film with an audience.

You worked with a co-editor. Was that a deliberate choice not to edit alone? Since you are also a protagonist, there might have been scenes you hesitated to include, and an external editor could help. For instance, I felt the film lacks the actual moment of Serhii’s break with the family. We see him struggle with responsibility for the household and the children, and then a baby is born, but we don’t see open conflicts or arguments. At one point, you simply inform us via titles that he decided to leave. Was that period unfilmed, or did you choose to omit it in the edit?

I remember the summer before Serhii’s birthday as tense, he had already begun distancing himself from the children. The film includes scenes that show his detachment: raising his voice at the boys, irritation. His conversations with his wife had grown cold by late summer, and we tried to show the disappearance of emotional contact — the way he touches his wife, or her pregnant belly, very cautiously. The trigger for their separation, unfortunately, was the birth of their daughter. Though that’s joyous news, I think he couldn’t withstand the pressure of circumstances.

I didn’t manage to film the breakup. Theoretically, it was impossible — when someone comes to gather their things and leave, it’s an intensely private moment, I simply wouldn’t have been allowed in. As an author, I felt I would cross an ethical line by including highly charged conversations. That’s why the film has no direct quarrels. We tried to construct the breakup through subtext in the material we had. I do understand your point that the film might have been strengthened by more visibly expressed moments of conflict. But since it’s a documentary, that was difficult for me. How do you show what your subjects fundamentally don’t want you to show?

You filmed a story about an anti-terrorist operation veteran several years before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Yet at the end of the film, you add in subtitles that after the 2022 invasion, Serhii — by then no longer living with his family — mobilised again. Can viewers infer that he never adapted to civilian life, hadn’t recovered from his previous combat trauma, and returned to war? And in that case, as someone who has lived through a personal drama in a relationship with a veteran and as the film’s director, what would you recommend society do to better reintegrate veterans into civilian life?

It’s a very complex task. And because state-level reintegration programs are slow to function, I want the audience to leave the film asking: what can we do for veterans at the community level?

For example, if I lived now in Irpin, where my home is, there is probably someone in our building who has returned from the war. At the very least, I could ask that neighbour — someone close to my home and therefore close to me — how they’re doing. And if that person has a family, children, the residents of the building, as a micro-community, could organise to help with childcare. Small but necessary support for these families is something we can arrange ourselves.

There are also many effective initiatives we can support financially — for instance, Veteran Hub. I see some banks incorporating social responsibility by backing veterans’ entrepreneurial projects. That truly warms my heart. I was once invited to a discussion with the Ministry of Veterans Affairs of Ukraine, NGOs, veterans, and activists. It was proposed to draft a strategic action plan for reintegration, first, to restore a sense of dignity, and to offer work where veterans feel needed. It seems to me that it is through work, first of all, a person can restore meaning in life.

Dmytro Sydorenko
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