Still: Death in the Making - Piotr Pawlus

Polish director Piotr Pawlus cites the classic 1938 Robert Capa photo book Death in the Making, about the Spanish Civil War, as one of the main inspirations for his new feature doc (which shares the book’s title). But the film’s focus, Pawlus tells SEE NL, was not the soldiers, rather the “humanity, the ordinary people.”

The film, playing in International Competition at Visions du Réel, looks at the everyday lives of Ukrainians whose existences have been turned upside down by the full-scale Russian invasion.

Pawlus has extensive recent experience of war-torn Ukraine. He was one of the cinematographers on Sergei Loznitsa’s The Invasion (2024), and he has also worked as a volunteer in the country, helping refugees and delivering aid supplies. Together with Tomasz Wolski he co-directed the 2023 documentary In Ukraine, selected for Berlinale Forum and which chronicled what was happening in the immediate wake of the February 2022 Russian aggression.

One of the most intriguing facets of Death in the Making is the way it combines verité footage with still photography. For the moving images, the director used a digital camera (“Blackmagic pocket 4K”) but he used an analogue camera for many of the still images.

“I try to describe the feelings and emotions I had during the shooting when I made a journey through the whole of Ukraine,” the director says. There is also haunting imagery of bombed buildings, rubble and destruction.

In the course of his travels, Pawlus met many different people. He’d spend a few days with some of them and just a few hours with others - but would try to get as close to all of them as possible. “The camera was my eyes,” Pawlus says.

“It was very important to get very pure and natural moments. Also, listening. That was the main goal.”

Pawlus spent well over a year editing the documentary. At one stage, he was hospitalised as he had to have an important heart operation. (“I spent around four months in hospital, and more months in recovery.”) 

He jokes the nurses used to tell him off for working on the film when he was still a patient on the wards. “I had my hard-drives but the nurses were very furious. They said I had brought my office to the hospital!”

Amsterdam-based producer and co-writer Ruoyao Jane Yao was employed for several years as a sales agent, working at Fortissimo before beginning to make her own films. Her previous projects include Bo Wang’s hybrid mid-length doc, An Asian Ghost Story, about the role of wigs in Asia during the 1960s Cold War era and how the “hair trade” became intensely politicised after the US banned the import of Chinese hair products. 

Death in the Making was produced through her company Vines Films and co-produced by New Wave Film in Poland, with support from the Netherlands Film Fund. “The core of the story we developed in the Netherlands,” she notes. 

This is a closely focused study of Ukrainians. Its many protagonists include families bombed out of their houses, old ladies living in underground stations, boys with rifles and soldiers on the frontline. At one stage, Pawlus shoots from inside a food truck, dispensing meals to Ukrainians no longer in a position to cook for themselves. The producer emphasises that this is a documentary about people, “not a film about war.” 

Death in the Making was an independently financed project, which gave Pawlus and Yao the “flexibility and freedom” to experiment with structure. They eventually divided the material into a series of thematic chapters with headings like ‘Village,’ ‘Town,’ ‘City’ or ‘Frontline.’

The documentary opens evocatively with the click of the camera heard on the soundtrack as we see images of the equipment, money and provisions that the director has packed for his epic journey. “We actually tried many different versions,” Yao recalls of the way the footage was eventually moulded together.

The project has its origins even earlier than the full-scale invasion. Back in 2019, Pawlus took his camera and ventured toward the Carpathian Mountains. “I had the feel that I wanted to do something, I didn’t know what,” he recalls. He made several different trips over the next five years. 

With his military press card, he was able to move fairly freely - “but the secret service also checked my background,” he tells SEE NL. At one stage, he was filming on the frontline just a few hundred yards from the Russian invaders. He had been sleeping in a metro station and received a call from connections that he would be picked up early in the morning. His contacts took him close to where the battle was raging. 

Death in the Making is looking to secure Dutch distribution soon. After its premiere in Nyon, it will travel further on the festival circuit. The filmmakers are also contemplating collecting some of Pawlus’ thousands of photographs of post-invasion Ukraine in book form.

Find out more about Visions du Réel here.