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‘Real’ Review: Oleh Sentsov’s Ukrainian War Documentary Is Unplanned but Utterly Immersive
Director Oleh Sentsov takes us literally into the trenches in 'Real,' with a single 90-minute shot from an accidentally switched-on GoPro camera.
Any cynical notions that the filming may not have been as unintentional as stated are thwarted by the relative lack of incident in the footage, which covers no particular crux point in the men’s plight as they anxiously await evacuation, and ends only when the camera battery runs out. Outside the tight remit of the film itself, “Real” also adds a compelling chapter to the storied career of Sentsov himself — a Crimean-born filmmaker and activist whose 2014 arrest and subsequent imprisonment for his participation in the Maidan Uprising prompted global protests and a 145-day hunger strike on his part, before his eventual release in 2019. What details and coordinates we can’t extract from scratchy radio bursts are made up for by the film’s clammy atmospheric immersion — the fear, barely stifled in the drawn, harrowed faces captured on camera, that this unlovely hollow might be the last place they ever see.
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