Viktor

Elegantly fusing rigorous reportage with cinematic subjectivity, this bold documentary from filmmaker and veteran war photographer Olivier Sarbil offers a deeply personal perspective on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Crafting an audiovisual experience carefully designed to match that of its subject, Viktor is an intimate portrait of a Deaf person navigating chaos and violence.

Viktor lives with his mother in Kharkiv. Having lost his hearing at age five, he has dedicated his life to visual representation, creating beautiful black-and-white photographs of the world around him. Heavily influenced by his late father, who taught him “the military spirit,” and by Miyamoto Musashi’s canonical The Strategy of the Samurai, Viktor aspires to a noble warrior philosophy.

But his disability means he can’t find work and, when war breaks out, he is frustrated by his inability to defend his country. That is, until he convinces the local army to take him on as a volunteer photographer. What Viktor captures with his camera, both among desperate civilians and those fighting on the frontlines, is startling, vital, and palpably humane.

Director Sarbil himself suffered an injury that affected his hearing, and this film — which uses the same Oscar-winning sound design team that worked on TIFF ’19 Platform contender Sound of Metal — brilliantly evokes the winnowed voices and muffled rumbles of Viktor’s aural environment. Just don’t mistake Sarbil’s mimetic of sound as anything resembling pity. As Viktor himself explains, silence is not the absence of something. It is the presence of the self.

THOM POWERS