With Kherson: Human Safari writer, photographer and now documentarian Zarina Zabrisky has created a remarkable visual ode to the Ukrainian front-line city of Kherson: its human residents (which from its original 280, 000 have now dwindled down to an estimated 71,000), its lacerated buildings, the animals and plants that hang on to life in various degrees of trauma and recovery, the right bank of the Dnipro River, subjected to incessant Russian artillery and the folly of man-made flooding. It’s an ode to the unified spirit of resistance that brings all sorts of different beings together. For the people of Kherson, it’s a compendium of the myriad ways they have managed to retain their humanity, beyond the facile slogan “Stay Human” that is thrown around in these days of world-wide turbulence, without a real understanding of its meaning.
Zarina Zabrisky’s skillful and poetic camera-work guides spectators in witnessing the images of the city over the three-year span of the invasion and war, listening to the words, the silences and body language of the actual people of Kherson, not actors, their dismays and hopes, their dances and music interwoven at strategic points of the documentary, their reflections and aspirations. Through the combination of different art forms (speech, music, dance – the latter we then find out is performed by a local dentist) the spectator is put in a position to acquire a more holistic understanding of the scattered news, images and commentaries that have reached the Western world in these past three years of war, not counting the ‘silent war’ that started in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and then the attempt to annex the Donbas region. Above and beyond the noise, controversies and talking heads that audiences have become accustomed to over the years, including in these days of hybrid wars – the work of acknowledged and unacknowledged pro-Putin propagandists- what emerges from this documentary is the extraordinary vitality and dignity of a people who have stayed in their city and must come to terms with their life experience, losses, separation, solidarities and betrayals, and prospects for the future. They do so by showing the audience textiles and embroideries as a memory source, by pointing out features of the natural landscape as they walk by the banks of the Dnipro River, by giving glimpses of the cultural life of the city that has moved underground, in the literal sense of the word. Among the scenes that stick with viewers is an old man confronting Russian soldiers in the early days of March 2022 asking with utter indignation “Where are the Nazis? I don’t see any here!”. And later, the exact recounting of war crimes, including rapes that took place during the Russian occupation. Footage of the Russian induced flood from the destruction of Kakhovka Dam reveals the apocalyptic dimension of ecocide and recalls many of the lines from Iryna Shuvalova’s poem great water triptych .
Divided into chronologically driven chapters, the documentary weaves a complex tapestry of experience, a narrative arc that includes national history and individual past, the present and hopes for the future in spite of the crescendo of cruelty to which every individual has been subjected to by the Russian army, culminating in the final chapter with the “human safaris” mentioned in the title, with its disturbing visualization of individual humans as drone targets from the point of view of the shooter.
The medium of interviews with a vast range of Khersonians, a majority of them women of various age, social classes, professions is used as the main tool for narrating the war. The documentary does so with the depth and pathos of so many other artistic products from Ukraine that have been subjected to the crucible of the full scale and invasion and war (I can think of a vast array of poetry from contemporary Ukrainian poets, novels like Mondgreen: Songs of Death and Love by Volodymyr Rafeyenko, documentaries like Porcelain War, by Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev).
Though viewers have witnessed a crescendo of horror from the description of brutal, indiscriminate killings of civilians by Russian soldiers in the initial phases of the war, to the mass incineration and mass graves reserved to dead Russian soldiers as well, after liberation the relentless shelling from the opposite bank of the river that is barely one km away from the city, the death and destruction caused by blowing up of the dam and the lethal Russian deterrence from rescuing survivors, nothing can prepare them for being the targets of human safaris. Though we are accustomed to fearing nuclear weapons and mass death, being the selected target of Russian specialist delivering napalm and grenades specifically to you with the intention of killing or maiming you as you return from work, or step out of your car to go to the doctor, or as you are on a bike with your child, is impossible to countenance. Nevertheless, one of the interviewees admits to instinctively want to turn that drone around to target those who are targeting him, but then thinks better of it, realizing what its consequences of that action would be and refuses to plummet so low. An appeal to stay human, maintain our conscience even in dark times. Unfortunately, the scenes shown are also a sign of a form of warfare that could be normalized in the 21st century, and unlike Zarina Zabrisky very few film makers seem to be ready to talk about it. The concluding scene shows the inner mechanism of a clock ticking, and with that image the director is driving the point of the urgency of our acting to prevent the daily massacre of a people.
The documentary is ushered in and closes on the notes and the words of the 1930’s standard “Dream a little dream of me” which may echo in our minds covered in the voices of Ella Fitzgerald, Sylvie Vartan or Eddie Vedder, I think we ought to interpret it as a call from the people of Kherson urging us to dream together and act to bring about a world free of the nightmares they are experiencing and that are shown so convincingly in this documentary.
Pina Piccolo, July 18, 2025
Cover image: Poster for the documentary