The harsh scenes from the war between Russia and Ukraine, which agitated us all at the beginning of the campaign, have become over time something to which the world seems to have become indifferent.
A year has passed since the Russian invasion, and tonight (Thursday) - the front is coming to our screen.
The journalist Itai Engel reached the front line of the fighting, and returned from there with a film shot in Donetsk and Donbass.
Engel received rare access to the frontline fighters of the Ukrainian army and brought documentation from the frontline fighting, under barrages of gunfire and the threat of Russian drones trying to track them down.
The result - "Alone at the Front", Engel's film, which will be broadcast tonight on the "Ovda" show at Beshet 12.
"We received rare access to journalists, not only from Israel. They saw the first film we made about the battle in Kiev in February. On the one hand, they want to have a record of what is happening, and on the other hand, they are suspicious of journalists - and rightly so, because they take the risk that military secrets will be revealed that could harm them ", Engel shares.
Fighters of the "Ukrainian Foreign Legion" fighting in the Donbass, photo: AP
Tell me about where you've been.
"For six months, they took 20 percent of Ukraine's territory, then Western weapons arrived in Ukraine, and it launched a counterattack. In a week and a half, they recaptured what was occupied by the Russians for five months. Suddenly, a situation arose in which the Ukrainians are winning on all fronts, except for the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine And in the Donetsk district. That's where we were. We were on the front line, about a kilometer from us were the Russians, and in total we were there for about three weeks."
When the war broke out, the Israeli media covered it continuously, but it seems that lately it has become indifferent to what is happening there.
"This description is true for Ukraine, and it applies to the whole world. It was like this when I worked in Bosnia, in the war in the Congo, in Chechnya, in Iraq and in Syria. It always starts with a media celebration, bordering on obsession with the subject, and then suddenly everyone ignores it. People don't want to hear more About the atrocities, and in my eyes it's terrible. I continue to follow these places, and I'm in a place that allows me to do more things, even if it's not daily coverage but a docu."
In fact, in these cases you are one of the few who are still going to cover the difficult events.
"I believe that journalism is going to the field. We are in a world where journalists have become commentators. They talk in the studio about places they have not been, and interpret people they have never met. It is terribly difficult - this stay, the planning, the debates about whether to go, the things that are exposed to. When I In the field I work, function, not related to my real life here. I switch to another 'mode' and become super concentrated. When you come back from there, it's always a kind of breakdown."
You have created an image of a person who is not afraid of anything. Are there things that scare you?
"I don't live a life of challenges, but there is this profession and the importance I attach to it. I am not a fighter, and I have never fired a weapon in my life, there is nothing macho about me."
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