The Illusion Of A Quiet Night

Bluesky

As Ukraine’s war with Russia continues, Olga Chernykh’s documentary is one of the latest films from Ukraine to celebrate the everyday resilience and quiet heroism of the citizens while also articulating the great loss that has been suffered. It sounds trite as you write it but life, does indeed, go on, even in the worst of circumstances. Like Sergei Loznitsa’s The Invasion and his short Paleontology Lesson, it offers a kaleidoscope of different experiences but, in this case, within very specific parameters.

It was created, as its title indicates, over the course of a single night – July 27 into July 28, 2025 – when 40 cinematographers and 300 people picked up cameras to document a snapshot of their lives in 64 widespread locations across the country, from Kyiv to Donetsk. The result is as eclectic as you might expect, featuring everything from a train station to a supermarket and the birth of the next generation through to soldiers on the frontline. The man wielding the camera there says he was planning to film his commander but he was killed the previous week, “That’s how it goes,” he says, encapsulating the toll the war even takes on emotions like shock and grief.

In other places, we watch night shifts continuing, a taxi driver picking up a customer and clubbers dancing into the night.

Some of the footage is observational, including shots of people who have just boarded a train, the camera patiently looking at their faces, inviting us to consider where they are going and for what reason and how they are feeling as a result. Other elements feel more like intimate slices of video diary, as those with the camera reveal their inner thoughts directly to us.

With this much footage and varying levels of photographic skill, it’s a film that needs to come together in the edit, so much credit is due to Maryna Maykovska and Kasia Boniecka as well as Chernykh for helping to maintain the flow between experiences, even though there is, by the film’s deliberately patchwork nature, no obvious arc. The strength of The Illusion Of A Quiet Night lies in the huge range of perspectives it contains. While it has been shaped by the director, this is nonetheless a document of hundreds of real lives that show the refusal of human emotions and experience to be confined by conflict while acknowledging its toll.

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