“Just from the screams, we could tell what kind of torture it was,” Olha, a Ukrainian woman, recalls in “Traces,” soberly summoning back the day of when her family was divided into different rooms by Russian soldiers that had entered her home under specious pretense and sought to pit different members against one another by hearing shrieks of pain from every corner of their home. It is as difficult to hear as you imagine it is for Olha to say, but co-directors Alisa Kovalenko and Marysia Nikitiuk ease the burden on both ends by loosely detaching the emotion from the memory as Olha has to get through it, having the camera roaming about collecting random imagery in the house where it took place, still quite literally under fire as explosions can be heard in the distance and to look outside with a burnt orange sky and black clouds at night can look like the gates have opened to hell.
Four years into the Russian invasion of Ukraine when its obvious horrors are well understood, the calm and lucid testimony of Olha and others like her are likely to reverberate more than the screams, something that the filmmakers and their primary subject, Iryna Dovhan, both appear to be in agreement on as the latter pursues collecting interviews with female survivors of sexual abuse and other violence at the hands of soldiers for her organization SEMA. The end goal is presenting a historical record to The Hague, but having Kovalenko and Nikitiuk around allows her to make a case for the court of public opinion well before, visiting women immediately around her home in the Kherson region who may be reluctant to come forward but unfortunately have all too many stories to tell. As sensitively as Iryna goes about gathering these experiences without triggering additional trauma, they are presented just as conscientiously by Kovalenko and Nikitiuk, who balance the descriptions of inhumane behavior provided in calm voiceover with tactile visuals abstract enough to bring your guard down, whether it’s of Tetiana running her hands across the bullet holes that remain in the walls of her house as she remembers being forced around the room at gunpoint or Mefadiivna pacing around an abandoned school after recalling how a soldier that burst into her home by smashing her face with the butt of a rifle. The filmmakers aren’t soft-pedaling what they know is deeply distressing nor do they revel in it for shock value, but allow environments that have been hollowed out and destroyed to speak volumes about the people for whom that’s the only shelter they have besides the ability to express the truth.
The approach is quite powerful with a particularly strong anchor in all respects in Iryna, who is the first to share her story looking out over a garden she still tends to, and grapples with the psychological and eventually physical toll of carrying around all this testimony. In between her meetings with other women, there are reminders of how much she has had to absorb when transcribing the interviews. While she can take pride in the cumulative effects of building confidence for greater numbers to speak up with everyone she is able to get to open up, it clearly can become an overwhelming task for one person to shoulder such responsibility and though Iryna clearly would never say it’s too much, that concern runs throughout. As the women she interviews clearly will live with the trauma of what happened to them for the rest of their lives, “Traces” considers battles that take place far from where armed conflict is taking place as a result of Russian aggression, not only as people contend with great loss or destabilization, but how warfare extends to stunning enemies into silence, making each word the survivors speak a form of resistance, with Kovalenko and Nikitiuk affording that piercing quality to come through undiluted.
“Traces” does not yet have U.S. distribution. It will next play at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen on March 16th at 6:30 pm at the Gloria Biograf, March 18th at 7:15 pm at Kunsthal Charlottenborg and March 20th at 5 pm at Dagmar Teatret.