As the Russia-Ukraine war enters its third grim year, a potent new film has emerged from the heart of the conflict. People (Ludzie), an epic anti-war drama from Warsaw Film School, weaves together five raw, interconnected stories that lay bare the brutalizing realities of the battlefield and the lives it destroys.
Threads of War
At the core of People are five narrative threads that collide and reverberate with the shockwaves of war:
- A Polish man arrives in Ukraine to meet his doctor lover but becomes entangled in escorting a group of visually impaired orphans to safety.
- An elderly Ukrainian couple, the wife and her war veteran husband, stubbornly refuse to abandon their home even as danger encroaches.
- A Russian mother in designer clothing has bribed her way to the frontline in Ukraine to search for her soldier son.
- A wounded Russian soldier in a Ukrainian hospital spews toxic rhetoric about Russian superiority, horrifying the doctors trying to save him.
- A harrowing frame story glimpsed in fragments – Ukrainian women huddled in a basement, seen from a baby’s-eye view under a cot.
While not every storyline lands with equal impact, the way they snake and tangle through each other builds to a gut-punch of a climax, one that showcases bravura filmmaking and an instinctive grasp of the obscenity of war.
Satire and Symbolism
Amidst the unsparing brutality, sly notes of dark satire emerge, particularly in the portrayal of the Russian mother. Bedecked in Gucci and a Putin sweatshirt, her privileged cluelessness clashes obscenely with the horrors she blithely navigates, begging a monstrous crematorium boss for information about her son.
Potent visual symbolism also threads through the narratives. The partially-sighted orphans, abandoned to blindly navigate the chaos, become stand-ins for the confusion and helplessness of wartime innocents. A balloon animal from a zoo drifts over a corpse incinerator, a poetic visual link between storylines and a stark metaphor for the way whimsy curdles to horror in war.
Unflinching Witness
But it is the final thread that delivers the film’s most devastating gut-punch. Placing the camera under a baby’s cot, the lens becomes unflinching witness to the violations visited on the women hiding in the cellar. When one woman finally breaks, fleeing into the chaos, we see the destruction through her eyes – long, unblinking takes that refuse to look away from the obscenities of invasion.
It’s raw but epic film-making with an instinctive grasp of the obscenity of war.
— Phil Hoad, The Guardian
People (Ludzie) unites its disparate storylines in the end into a singular, searing howl of anguish against the dehumanizing insanity of war. Uncompromising in its brutality yet also poetic in its humanity, this is filmmaking as an act of witness and resistance, a rallying cry for the innocence obliterated in the maw of battle.
Drawn from the still-raw experiences of a war not yet ended, People joins the ranks of other unflinching Eastern European war films like Come and See that use the visceral power of cinema to lay bare atrocity. Its stories, both interconnected and shrapnel-fractured, become a mirror for the way war itself is both a shared and an individually splintering experience. It is essential viewing, not just as a record of a still-raging war, but as a reminder of the need to stare unblinking at the horrors we humans inflict on each other.
People (Ludzie) is a film that demands to be seen, even as it refuses to look away from the unspeakable. As brutal as it is necessary, it stands as a testament to the enduring power of cinema to bear witness to the best and worst of our shared humanity.
