Vitaly Mansky’s shocking portrait of wartime life, Time to Target, lets the audience breathe, absorb the details, and somehow even laugh, as the camera focuses on Lviv, in western Ukraine, which was once thought to be relatively safe.
Of course, with the advent of Russian cruise missiles and Shahed drones, that illusion has ended at this point in the three-year war with Ukraine. But Mansky still depicts everyday life as it always has been: a military band practicing for a memorial, a wedding, a theater performance that ends abruptly because of an air raid, a new mother whose baby is born just as the sirens go off.
“This film is not about convincing anyone or changing their minds,” Mansky says. “It provides an opportunity to experience the war that is part of civilian life.”
“Time to goal”
Provided by Hypermarket Film
That’s why he’s comfortable with movies that run for three hours and aren’t for everyone, he added.
“I’m counting on the theater audience who come to see this film knowingly, and most importantly, the 30- to 50-year-old audience (hopefully) who have never had such an experience in their lives.”
But the daily ritual of “Time to the Target” is both universal and uniquely Ukrainian.
Grieving families gather to remember their deceased fathers and sons. But gravediggers complain that there is no more space in Lviv’s military cemetery, which holds the remains of soldiers from centuries of war.
“Time to goal”
Provided by Hypermarket Film
One miner worries that if they are indeed to be buried until the Second Coming, as the priests proclaim during burials, how can they go about this business of exhuming so many bodies to make room for new burials?
“This field has always been a military cemetery,” Manski says of his hometown. “During World War I, Austrian soldiers were buried here, and during World War II, Soviet soldiers were buried here. Now they have been exhumed and, as far as I know, reburied.”
Lviv is about 1,000 kilometers from the front lines of the Russian invasion, but as Mansky shows, there is not much psychological relief from the war.
Indeed, children play and go to school. “This is in front of us,” the teacher says to the ninth graders. The couple falls in love and life begins. But there is also a moment of silence each day at 9 a.m. when everyone pauses to honor our heroes.
A commemorative ceremony is then held, and churches and streets are filled with processions. End your day at the park by practicing shooting your paint gun at a portrait of President Putin. And every member of a military band has a story about a son who was burned in battle, or a story about returning to the military despite being discharged.
“No one believes we will last this long,” says one musician. “They give us weapons one teaspoon at a time, so we don’t lose, so we don’t win,” says one, lamenting the speed of military aid.
Despite daily life going on as normally as possible, the city has somehow irreversibly changed.
“I thought Lviv was an eternal city and I thought I knew it well,” Mansky said. “But in 2014, when the first war started, and then a full-scale war, when we passed through Lviv or went somewhere else, we gradually began to notice things changing.”
Mansky, whose films have chronicled life in modern-day Ukraine and the former Soviet Union, has taken on everything from Russian gas pipelines to President Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, and has teamed up with Czech documentarians and producers Vit Krusak and Filip Lemunda to direct “Time to the Target.”
“Many films about Ukraine today are made as manifestos,” says Mansky. “This is understandable and important. Evhen Titarenko and I also made such a film “Eastern Front” in 2023. But these manifestos do not allow the viewer to be involved in this tragedy. Even if the film shows a military conflict filmed with a GoPro camera, the viewer remains on the sidelines.”
What Mansky was after with “Time to the Target” was an understanding of different shades. “Our film creates a space where viewers can live their lives while feeling part of this catastrophe.”
This way, the band has time to practice, the players on the bus share funny phone videos, the bass drum bearer feels a strain on his back, and we get a glimpse of a little boy wearing his father’s military beret while the gravediggers shovel dirt.
Mansky’s frames are often wide with locked-down cameras, long takes, and deep focus, allowing people to continually enter and exit shots with many planes.
“For me, the inspiration for working on this film was Brueghel’s paintings, where you have a larger foreground of things like hunters and musicians, and a very detailed background depicting everyday life from birth to death.”
And through it all runs the constant tension of music. Sometimes a pop ballad or religious chorus plays in the background, and often a somber brass band recital. This, like the rest of Time to the Target, appears to be eternal and deathless.
“I met the musicians almost every day,” Mansky says. “It wasn’t just a shoot anymore, it was a kind of communal life. At least they didn’t treat me like a stranger anymore, and I’m very grateful for that.”
