Where Life and Death Coexist: Vitaly Mansky on Time to the Target

The title of Vitaly Mansky’s Time to the Target refers to “the flight time of a missile or the interval between the departure of an enemy aircraft to perform a combat mission until it reaches the specified target of destruction.” (This we learn at the end of Mansky’s masterful three-hour epic. The text card is followed by the dedication: “With love to my hometown Lviv.”) But the Russian-Ukrainian director’s latest, which will next play IDFA, is much less a “war doc” than a grand cinematic study of a specific place, western Ukraine’s largest city Lviv, where life and death coexist out of necessity. It’s a place where selfie-taking fashionistas casually share the cobblestone streets with men with missing limbs. (“If you give the Russians a finger, they’ll bite your hand off,” scoffs a soldier.) Where gravediggers complain about working conditions, and a mother in a labor ward speaks of needing to replace the ones who are dying with the newly born. A musician in the Band of the Hetman Petro Sahaidachnyi National Ground Forces Academy admits to having no plans for the future, since who knows what tomorrow might bring; indeed, he might very well be on the frontlines. And from there we cut to an outdoor dance party that could be a nighttime rave almost anywhere — if not for the little kid determinedly engaged in target practice. (Putin’s face has become the new bullseye.) And still, the funeral-tasked orchestra plays on. Two days before the February 17 premiere of Time to the Target in the Forum section of this year’s Berlinale, Documentary spoke with the award-winning documentarian (2020’s Gorbachev, Heaven, 2018’s Putin’s Witnesses) and founder of the original ArtDocFest, which was forced to cease activity in 2022 due to Russian censorship and the unjust war. Special thanks to Daria Buteiko for providing translation throughout the Zoom interview.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.