During
our Civil War, spectators would pack a lunch to watch the battles. These days,
war is a far riskier viewing experience. Oleg Afanasyev should know. He
lives in the small village of Hnutove, which is so close to front line errant
shells seem just as likely to overshoot it as well. Daily life is a challenge
there, but it is the only home he and his guardian grandmother have ever known.
Afanasyev must deal with the common byproducts of war, including fear and
boredom, in Simon Lereng Wilmont’s documentary The Distant Barking of Dogs (trailer here), which screens during
this year’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York.
Neither
Afanasyev or his grandmother has much to say about politics, but from what we
gather, they are Russian-speakers, who identify as Ukrainian. His mother died
during his infancy and his father is never mentioned. However, he has a single
aunt and a cousin, with whom he is close, in a mischievous boy kind of way, but
her lover will take them deeper into Ukraine once he is discharged from the
army.
Distant Barking is an immersive,
observational film. It never really says anything about Russian military adventurism
in Ukraine, because it doesn’t need to. The audience can see the resulting
wreckage in nearly every frame. Hnutove, pop. 700 and dropping, is
fast-becoming a ghost-town, but Afanasyev and his grandmother are not going
anywhere. Partly, it is because they have no place else to go. Language is also
an issue, as his cousin learns. Yet, they also feel tied to the land.
This
is a film of somber beauty that gives the audience a direct, experiential sense
of what it is like to live a literal stone’s throw from a war zone. The word
that best describes the scarred environment is probably “ghostly.” Serving as
his own director of photography, Wilmont vividly captures the surreal nature of
the locale, but his lens also seems to pick up every troubled thought that
travels through the open-faced Afanasyev’s mind. Nobody physically dies
on-screen, but we can see the protracted death of his innocence happening over the
course of two years’ time.
