Since Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine, in February 2022, the escalating conflict has quickly become one of history’s most photographed and filmed events. Alongside footage shot by civilian witnesses and the work of reporting journalists, documentary film crews proved key in capturing the reality of events, bearing witness before the widest possible audience. Therefore, a recurrent task of Ukrainian war documentaries is to provide recordings, whether self-created or received from civilians, with a historical context and meaningful explanations aimed at international viewers. The central theme of these films is their contemporaneity, their relevance to the here and now, while their mode of representation often reveals broader horizons and deeper links.

The curatorial team of Verzió strived to compile a most diverse selection of the latest documentaries capturing the war. Panoramic and dispassionate accounts of the war and close-up depictions of the front lines are accompanied by works that present life in Ukraine in the recent period through individual stories told from personal or often unusual points of view. We believe that these films together are capable of sketching a multi-faceted, complex, and nuanced picture of what has been happening in the immediate proximity of Hungary in the past three years.