Film review: 1% of War, a new documentary reveals harrowing details from the frontline in Ukraine

There were tears in the darkness as the film footage rolled. Stifled cries around the room and chokes of emotion as scenes of shattered hamlets, villages and towns beamed across the screen. And there were tears for the people, the very few people still living lethally close to the front line of a war that has now ground on for three miserable years.

This is the brutal war between Russia and Ukraine, seen in all its bleakness, and yet hope. Seen through the eyes and cameras of the volunteer who goes into the most dangerous, desolated places imaginable to rescue the people who refused to leave when the awful shelling began.

Every rescue is filmed on helmet-mounted cameras and smartphones held in the hand. And now the footage so many courageous efforts have yielded has been made into a film, 1% of War.

Snippets of that content are being previewed at selected closed events around the country, in the build up to a number of planned festival screenings later in the year. And on Saturday 22 February the team was in Nottingham.

Russia’s invasion of sovereign Ukraine in 2022 caused shockwaves around the world, opening up a grim theatre of conflict of the kind Europe thought it would never see again. 

Russia’s invasion of sovereign Ukraine in 2022 caused shockwaves around the world, opening up a grim theatre of conflict of the kind Europe thought it would never see again. 

Those awful days were felt most violently in the east of the country, and in the horrified halls of power in Kyiv. But Ukrainians all around the world heard the terrible, distant thunder of Russian troops, tanks and artillery storming across their border.

Last Saturday, further grim realities of it all were brought to our city’s Ukrainian community, and their Nottingham allies, during a sombre event at the Nottingham Ukrainian Cultural Centre attended by East Midlands Mayor, Claire Ward.

The filmmaker team led by Denys Khrystov, a former Ukrainian TV host and YouTube star, don’t document the many battles that are raging along a 600 mile Russian front - though they do come perilously close. 

Khrystov goes to the places where there are still people living the semblance of a life in what’s left of their homes. For their own complex reasons when everyone else was fleeing, these people refused, or couldn’t bear, to leave. 

By the time Khrystov gets the call, whatever desperate hope or fear that had been keeping those people there has finally left them. They have finally reached out for help.

The footage Khrystov has produced of the daring rescues he and his team mount is truly astonishing. 

In the first of the clips a terribly wounded soldier, Sasha, is found dying in the road. To the doleful background track of artillery shells thudding ominously nearby, single-handedly Khrystov helps the broken and groaning man into his jeep, and races off to the nearest medical centre.

Another sequence shows the team arriving to rescue a man and his elderly mother from their home in the stricken town of Avdiivka. But it is too late for the man’s mother - she has died there in the home. The footage ends with a sad procession from the house, led by a son helping to carry the body of his mother in a thick, black plastic bag, to the waiting jeep outside.

It is hard to watch. But there is stoic humour too. There was laughter in the darkness as well. The Ukrainian character laughs through pain and fear just as Brits do, and you can’t help but chuckle when Khrystov’s truck becomes the scene of a hectic escape for a herd of inquisitive goats.

Khrystov has seen all the footage and hundreds more sequences many times over - the title is in part a reference to the fact that only 1% of thousands of hours of footage recovered will make it into the final cut. But he is still deeply affected by watching it. When the lights came back up on Saturday night, his eyes were red with tears.

Speaking to me after the preview alongside director Kolya But, and producer Yura Karagodin, Khrystov admitted that the experience of volunteering has “100%” changed him as a person, as the war has changed all Ukrainians. “It has removed the mask from people,” he said. “It has changed every Ukrainian. It has removed masks from every person and every politician. You can see who is who.”

This is Khrystov’s war. And all the while war goes on in eastern Ukraine, he and his team have sworn to keep fighting their own battle.

There have been numerous showings in numerous countries of the working materials of film, and there are more planned, as is a second version of 1% of War. But one moment from it all stays with Khrystov, from the night when the family of the wounded soldier, Sasha, were able to attend a show. 

“It was being able to see their reaction to what was happening on the screen that was the most emotional,” he says. “Moments like this give me the motivation to continue my volunteer work.”