Shards Of Light

Documentarians Marcus Lenz and Mila Teshaieva take a similar approach to Sergei Loznitsa’s The Invasion as they consider the enormity of the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the lives of everyday citizens.

They follow up their 2022 film When Spring Came To Bucha with a multi-faceted snapshot of life focusing again on the liberated Ukrainian city, where hundreds were killed in a massacre by Russian forces in 2022. A multigenerational approach means they track everything from school life through marriage disrupted by military service to some of those who have been hurt on the frontline. While most of the documentaries from Ukraine in recent years have been careful to present the citizenry as stoic and pulling together in the face of Russian aggression, Lenz and Teshaieva’s film is more nuanced in that it shows that the sustained pressure on the populace has led cracks to form in their united front.

This situation is particularly acute for Olga. She worked hard to keep people safe during the Russian occupation but finds herself accused of collaboration with the enemy, a Kafkaesque ordeal that we see stretch out for years. We also see the toll that the conflict takes on couple Maxim, who is serving on the frontline, and particularly his new wife Ana, who must wait at home, often not knowing exactly where her husband is. Telling conversations articulate the ongoing and lasting trauma of the war, with one woman wishing it could simply be “erased from our brains”. Absences abound in Shards Of Light, not least that experienced by Taras, who has remained in the city while his wife and young daughter have moved to the safe haven of France.

In the case of Alla, her husband, and the father of her adolescent son, Yuri, the absence is permanent, since her husband was killed in cold blood by the Russians. As the halting attempts by local authorities and the international community to hold people to account for that killing and others rumble on, we see the impact it has and the courageous steps Yuri takes in order to find his own way to some sort of resolution.

Other moments will be, sadly, familiar to those who have seen other documentaries from the region. That doesn’t mean that it’s any less heartwrenching to see schoolchildren being taught what a landmine looks like and told that, essentially, aside from roads nowhere is safe to play. In another snapshot, we see youngsters being taught to conduct a sweep for landmines by probing the ground, bringing home how close the danger is to these very young lives.

Lenz and Teshaieva’s largely observational approach is efficient and effective, with occasional intertitles well deployed to provide additional information when needed. The sense of hopefulness in people’s urge to continue and to rebuild shines through but this film also looks the lasting more negative impact of war unflinchingly in the eye.

Reviewed on: 07 Jul 2025