Olivier Sarbil’s “Viktor,” opening in Los Angeles October 3, is a warfare documentary in contrast to another. The title topic is a deaf Ukrainian man who needs to enlist in his nation’s armed forces in 2022 when Russia launches its full-scale invasion. However as he notes instantly within the trailer for “Viktor,” which IndieWire is proud to solely debut under, “The expensive are put aside. Out of contact with the listening to world.”
As a substitute, he turns into a warfare photographer documenting Ukraine‘s battle. Sarbil, the director, wished to inform a narrative in regards to the deaf neighborhood in Ukraine and the way it was coping with the warfare. The filmmaker was impressed by how he himself had misplaced listening to in one in every of his ears whereas making a earlier warfare documentary in “Libya.” Sarbil, who serves as cinematographer on “Viktor” as properly, taking pictures the movie in putting black-and-white monochrome, in the end realized that Viktor ought to be his topic. It’s a startling warfare movie as character examine, and builds off Sarbil’s earlier work directing warfare documentaries for “Frontline,” together with 2017’s “Mosul.”
“Viktor” premiered within the Platform part of TIFF 2024, and has since performed the Hamptons Worldwide Movie Pageant, Deauville, and Camerimage, the place it performed within the documentary options competitors.
The movie has many distinctive stylistic decisions. Deaf folks nonetheless really feel vibrations, in fact, so it has a sound design that tries to duplicate Viktor’s standpoint, together with being very vibration-heavy.
Giving the movie a rave “A” evaluation out of TIFF 2024, IndieWire mentioned, “One of many sudden gems of this 12 months’s fest, ‘Viktor’ is a (Darren Aronofsky-produced) doc from the multi-award-winning director/DP Olivier Sarbil, a globetrotting battle photojournalist who’s now chosen to set his newest in Ukraine. (Sarbil can be behind the 2019 Frontline doc ‘On the President’s Orders,’ co-directed with James Jones (‘Antidote’), a nail-biting investigative take a look at the previous Philippines strongman Rodrigo Duterte’s lethal ‘warfare on medicine’ by means of each its largely addict victims and chillingly remorseless perpetrators.) However what makes the movie so extraordinary is that the continuing invasion isn’t the main target however merely backdrop for a window into a very distinctive POV on the Russian assault.”
“Viktor” opens October 3 on the Cinelounge Hollywood in Los Angeles. Its opening weekend will characteristic Q&As with Sarbil performed by filmmakers Ondi Timoner and Amy Berg.