Ahead of the North American Premiere at New Directors/New Films, Intercepted, the new Ukrainian documentary directed by Oksana Karpovych revealed a new clip showing juxtaposed intercepted phone calls home from Russian soldiers on the frontlines in Ukraine with visuals of destruction caused by the invasion.

Intercepted recently world premiered at the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival where it won Special Mention for Amnesty International Film Award and Special Mention by Ecumenical Jury; and makes it North American Premiere on Friday, April 12, 2024.

In the two years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Security Service of Ukraine has intercepted, recorded, and made public thousands of cell phone calls between Russian soldiers on the front line and their mothers, wives, and girlfriends back home.

For her sophomore feature, Ukrainian-Canadian documentarian Oksana Karpovych charted a photojournalistic course across the country in the occupation’s wake to construct a fraught dialectical juxtaposition of sound and image, pairing fragments of those overheard conversations with arresting filmic compositions that capture the unsettled aftermath of invasion. Karpovych’s keen editorial sensitivity produces startling contrasts, drawing out the inherent tension between the soldiers’ casual accounts of looting and violent displacement (coupled with their family members’ muddled and distorted perception of geopolitical realities) and the camera’s deceptively tranquil tableaux of destruction and waste. The result is a document of astonishing discursive power, at once a stark reflection of the Russian imperial project’s callous disregard for civilian lives and a testament to the insidious efficacy of its propaganda machine.

Watch the new clip from Intercepted