The sun is shining.
Only the sound of a soldier's boots crunching on the ground disturbs the silence.
We follow him, sink along a trench to this makeshift bunker where his comrades are already entrenched.
A poor light bulb flashes on the ceiling, as a symbol of the fragility of the moment.
We are in Svitlodarsk, in the Donetsk region, with the Ukrainian army, in the year 2020. It was the time before the Russian offensive of February 24, which now fills our television screens, but it was already the war in the Donbass for six years.
On the other side of the front line, a few hundred meters away, are the pro-Russian separatist forces.
"Our dear friends", as the Ukrainian soldiers of the 30th Brigade ironically call them.
No images of bloody assaults, screams...
The images are in black and white.
And it's beautiful.
Loup Bureau, great reporter and director of this punchy documentary, in theaters this Wednesday, assumes this form of aestheticization of war.
"I wanted the viewer to think that it looks a lot like the First World War as it appears in the collective imagination, knowing that we are indeed in the 21st century.
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In the Loup Bureau documentary "Trenches", there is a lot of talk about waiting, and death, almost waiting for death... Les Alchimistes Films
Another paradox: this calm, which jumps to the eyes, and to the ears.
No images of bloody assaults, screams and thunder of fire.
In “Trenches”, there is a lot of talk about waiting, and death, almost waiting for death.
Loup Bureau, 32, explains: “When we imagine trench warfare, we think of incessant bombardments and fighting, when days can go by without anything happening.
And, all of a sudden, a shell falls on the bunker and the trench.
It is in these moments of waiting that the soldiers begin to ask themselves questions about themselves, about the purpose of their existence.
»
The director spent four months, alone with them, free to move around, without authorization from the military command.
“In these cases, if I can say it vulgarly, we are in the same shit.
In the universe of the trenches, one is struck by a great fraternity between the soldiers.
They know they're going to have to go through this together.
»
Humanize the mass combatant
Loup Bureau knew how to make himself invisible, to capture how we live, and how we die, in such a place, alternating daily tasks, boredom, young boys who lend themselves to war in video games in the casemates to forget that , very real, which awaits them behind the door, and moments of intense tension punctuated by the slamming of bullets and the whistle of mortar shells.
In 2017, Loup Bureau was arrested by Turkish authorities for filming Kurdish militias and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
“I told myself that I was going to spend my life in this prison.
When I finally got out after 52 days, my relationship to war and conflict zones had been turned upside down, I thought I would never leave again.
But I went to Ukraine, and I discovered this world of trenches, and exactly what I had been able to feel in prison: lethargy, very strong existential questioning.
»
Today, more than two months after the Russian offensive in Ukraine, the soldiers filmed by Loup Bureau are still holding their position, even if they do not know how much longer in the face of the debauchery of resources now committed by the Russians.
Some are dead.
With his film Loup Bureau wanted to humanize this fighting mass and remind us of what we often forget: that they are also living beings.
Editor's note:
4.5/5
“Tranches”, French documentary by Loup Bureau (2022).
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