Berlin director Natalya Efimkina records the voices of war. For example, the voice of Sergei Semyon. Natalya spoke to him a few days after Russia attacked Ukraine. Sergei is an artist and musician from Kyiv, but at the end of February 2022, like many young people in the Ukrainian capital, he started making Molotov cocktails “to have something to meet the invaders”.

Sitting in her workshop in northern Berlin, Natalia recalls the conversation. “I don’t want to die for Ukraine, I want to live for her,” I told him then. Two weeks before the war, Sergei fell in love with a girl, asked her to marry him, and was going to get married. And a few days ago, Natalya found out he died at the front.

Transfer the emotions of Ukrainians to Germany

Natalya Efimkina began recording Ukrainian monologues almost immediately after the invasion began. She was born in Kyiv, at age 12 she moved to Germany with her mother, where she made a successful film career. His debut film Garazhane, about northern Russia, won the Berlinale Prize in 2020. This year, Efimkina planned to shoot a documentary project in Ukraine. But instead, she started recording stories about the war.

“It happened by itself”, says Natalia. The day the war started, they gathered with friends here in their workshop to support each other. “We were in shock. We didn’t know what to do,” Natalia describes her condition. “But then we realized that we had to talk to people there, convey their emotions here, write them down.” Friends lent their recording equipment and Natalia started calling. First to friends and friends of friends, then to strangers.

Like, for example, Anya of Kherson, occupied by Russian troops. Natalya talked to her a few weeks ago when the woman with her daughters and husband had just left. “It was very scary to be in Kherson under occupation. You are like your own home, but like a prison,” she says. “I told the kids if anything, put bowls on their heads… I was so calmer that I did at least something, if suddenly (projectile – Ed.) will fly home.” In Kherson, Anya left her parents and brother. A few days after the interview, Natalya found out that Anya’s brother had been kidnapped. He was in captivity and there was no news from him.

“Ukrainians want to be heard”

These first-person stories from different parts of Ukraine are translated on the air and on the Radio Berlin-Brandenburg website (Radio Berlin-Brandenburg RBB). With her interlocutors, Natália talks “as much as necessary”, sometimes for several hours. But for radio broadcasts, it reduces recordings to three minutes.

The questions she asks her interlocutors are very simple. What is your name? How old are you? What do you do? Where are you? What’s going on there? His interviews are more like anthropological research than journalistic material. Editors often ask how she has such authentic conversations. Efimkina’s secret is to just listen and not interrupt. “Ukrainians want to be heard,” she explains.

Some heroes write to Natalya, and she is looking for someone on purpose. For example, psychologist Tatyana Ierusalimskaya from Kyiv, who works with victims of violence in Bucha. “It was important to me that the psychologist talked about it,” she says. For her, this story is one of the most difficult.

“Now our psychologists are faced with an experience that probably no one else in the modern world has had,” says Tatyana. “Girls aged 12 to 15, who didn’t even know what sex was, were subjected to terrible violence. These are the three girls I work with.”

For Natalia, it’s important to convey these horrors of war as people see them on the ground: “This is something brutal, it goes beyond human thought, and it’s important to me that they hear about it.” “We’re not dealing with a political situation,” she adds, “we’re dealing with evil. And that’s clear when you hear Tatyana and her story.”

Human stories versus propaganda

The war in Ukraine is now in its sixth month, and this topic is gradually disappearing from the front pages of German newspapers and press releases. But it is important that Efimkina continues to speak about the fate of his countrymen. “When we watch the news, we don’t get emotionally excited as much as when we hear the story of a mother who saves her child. The most important thing is to turn on your heart and feel what it would be like for you in their place. ,” she says.

Natalia talks not only to Ukrainians, but also to Russians. She met many of them on the set of her documentary Garazhane. “People in Russia want to talk too,” she says. “Maybe they want to talk not about the war, but about sanctions, how difficult it is for them when everything gets more expensive, how difficult it is to get out, nobody wants to accept it.”

But she sees her task in giving Ukrainians a voice. Her greatest wish is for that voice to be heard across the border—in Russia. “For me, ‘voices’ is truth versus propaganda,” says Natalya.