– The feature by Ukrainian director Olga Chernykh is a poetic and aesthetically powerful portrait of a people who are fighting for survival and seeking out the light amidst the horrors of war
After A Picture to Remember, which opened IDFA in 2023, Ukrainian director Olga Chernykh is once again homing in on a people who haven’t chosen war but who must invariably suffer it, in her latest feature, The Illusion of a Quiet Night, which was presented in the Visions du Réel Festival’s Burning Lights line-up. But rather than resignedly accepting a situation rife with uncertainty and violence, they seek out a modicum of hope, signs of humanity in a now infernal everyday life.
During the night of 27 and 28 July 2025, forty filmmakers travelled all throughout Ukraine – from the forests of the North to the steppes in the South and from front line stations to cities obliterated by aerial bombing – to report back over the course of a summer’s night on a country which has been at war for four years, a land which has been invaded and wounded but which never yields. These brief depictions are enriched with meaningful contributions from a hundred or so men and women who have filmed their daily lives under siege. Olga Chernykh’s film was born out of this collective work, this plurality of experiences. Adopting a personal and multifaceted approach, the director treats the audience to a collective tableau of people hailing from all corners of Ukraine, including the occupied territories of Donetsk and Crimea. Each of them gets through the night in their own way: some feel they have nothing left to lose and disappear into techno music which becomes the soundtrack to a cathartic collective rite; some are coming to terms with the loss of a loved one, and some try to find a semblance of normality in the reassuring but now meaningless rhythm of shiftwork.
What we’re invited to observe, over the course of one night, is a nation which has been fundamentally changed. The lightness associated with everyday acts has been replaced by fear, as they anxiously await a future marked by destruction and chaos: a resigned dog lies down in an apartment waiting for the bombs to stop dropping, a giraffe stares blanky in a now abandoned zoo, and a mother tries to comfort her child, telling him the sounds he can hear are just the everyday sounds of air raids. But in spite of everything, the desire to live and resist never leaves this wounded people, who have no intention of throwing in the towel. Whether in a fleeting moment of affection, a refusal to give into terror, or small everyday acts which turn into acts of resistance, the light overcomes the dark, reminding us that the fight is not yet lost. The Illusion of a Quiet Night is a film which turns the nighttime into an observatory of shattered but never submissive souls; human beings who are clinging onto the idea that, despite their exhaustion and fear, this too shall pass and life will resume its course.
In The Illusion of a Quiet Night, Olga Chernykh successfully combines a multitude of realities, viewpoints and sensitivities, establishing a dialogue between them. Through finely balanced and poetic editing, the director delivers a powerful portrait of a nation which has turned resilience into a weapon and a manifesto against indifference. Furtive, ferocious and powerful, life seems to ooze from each and every image, determined to resist despite the horrors of a brutal and unjust war. The Illusion of a Quiet Night encourages us to hope that the sun will rise again despite the relentless darkness of the night.
The Illusion of a Quiet Night was produced by Tabor and Suspilne Ukraine.
(Translated from Italian)
