“Songs of despair and freedom.” An Interview with Sashko Protyah

Sashko Protyah is a film director and activist from Mariupol, Ukraine. He is a co-founder of Freefilmers, a collective of artists and filmmakers. In his films, he works with topics of memory, otherness, and alienation. Now Sashko is based in Zaporizhzhia and volunteers to assist internally displaced persons (IDPs) and the Ukrainian army.

This interview took place in February 2024 via email.

VK: Sound has always played an important role in your films, and rather than traditional film music and sound effects, it is typically rather experimental and abstract. For some of your films you even do sound design and write music yourself. Can you tell me a bit about your relationship with sound as a filmmaker?

SP: If you’re an independent filmmaker who works outside the film industry, you need to be a little bit of everything, a DoP, a film editor, a sound recordist, a sound editor. Independent filmmaking is to a certain degree anti-Fordist, there’s no conveyor, no labor division, and it implies a lot of lo-fi makeshift solutions. Sound is very interesting to edit; it gives you more freedom, more adventure. Sound, separated from or in contrast to pictures, seems to acquire oneiric qualities, and you can allow many more things to happen than when you work with video, for example. There are more chances for a miracle, and of course many more chances that something can go weird. 

I’d already been listening to experimental music for years and had already discovered sound poetry when I started editing my first films. I still remember the interface of Cool Edit Pro back in the late 2000s, I can’t say the same about any other software from that time. I was captivated by the possibilities of that software, however naïve it may look now. It seemed to be cut out for working with materials recorded in the middle of nowhere in East Europe. It included all types of sound textures, from industrial noises captured near factories to bee-eaters’ songs above coastal sand cliffs. My sound experiments were amateur-like, and as I developed as a film director, I started cooperating with professional sound editors. My last two works were edited by sound artists and musicians. Olesia Onykiienko (known as NFNR) edited sound in My Favorite Job (2022), and Veronika Kanishcheva edited sound in 100% Off (2023). Sound, as it is recorded, always implies some musicality, which is why I suppose it is better to always work with it as potential music. I prefer any recorded sound to be addressed and treated as a potential composition. 

VK: Could you elaborate on that a bit, what foregrounding this musicality achieves for your film aesthetic?

SP: Documentaries more often rely on visual evidence than sounds, and when we talk about sound, we tend to talk about very specific recorded sound, such as interviews or a voiceover that comments on what we see in the shots. However, I am more fascinated by sound as it is, as material for a potential composition, whether it’s Serhii Horielov, the frontman of the Sievierodonetsk band Mendeleev Oshibalsya (Mendeleev Was Mistaken), reciting his poems inside an abandoned water tower (Revitalization of Spaces, 2018); a radio amateur tapping Morse code in an old Lviv apartment (Film of Sand, 2019); or heavy wind on the seaside near Mariupol mixed with a naive interpretation of a Bach prelude (Sea. Wind. Wtf, 2017). The films just share their frameworks for sound developments that, otherwise, could get lost.

VK: Ukraine has a very rich cinematic tradition. Does the sound design of classic – or contemporary for that matter – Ukrainian films inspire you in any way?

SP: Dzyga Vertov is famous for his pioneering in field sound recording for his documentary Enthusiasm: The Symphony of Donbas (1931). I’ve watched it many times, always paying more attention to visual poetics than sound. But the whole work was acoustically very special, although somewhat different from my modern sound impressions from industrial spaces. 

High quality sound is the most difficult to include: underground cinema is poor and having a sound recordist in a crew is already a luxury. It’s already quite an achievement if you can hear speech in the footage properly. It doesn’t necessarily become an obstacle for Ukrainian filmmakers. We have a lot of strong essayistic works. Like Varta, 1, Lviv, Ukraine (2015) by Yuriy Hrytsyna where the footage of suburban Lviv streets is dubbed with patrol activists’ walkie-talkie communications during the Maidan revolution. Now I’m also looking forward to seeing Oksana Karpovych’s Intercepted (2024), a documentary that visually reveals the destruction of Ukraine while playing the telephone conversations of ordinary Russian soldiers with their relatives and friends in Russia.

VK: Would you say that these limitations created a particular sound aesthetic in contemporary independent cinema in Ukraine?

SP: I suppose so. It’s too early to talk about it as some Ukrainian phenomenon, but I do know filmmakers who are thinking in this direction, creating and making sense of essayistic cinema.

VK: The elephant in the room in our conversation is, of course, the Russian invasion in Ukraine. You are from Mariupol, the city which has seen some of the worst destruction in this war so far. It is perhaps less common knowledge that prior to that, between 2014 and 2022, Mariupol essentially had been on the frontlines of the invasion, under constant threat from the Russian-sponsored separatists. How has that affected you as an artist?

SP: In 2014, from April to June, Mariupol was briefly occupied by the DPR^[1] thugs, and in January 2015, Mariupol lived through a rocket attack, launched from territory occupied by pro-Russian separatists. During this attack 31 civilians died, and many more were injured in the Vostochny district. Those events had a huge impact on the Mariupol society. Mariupol citizens became much more politically conscious and involved in all types of grassroots activities. My friends facetiously called that social shift a “Mariupol Renaissance.” There were many centers in the city where civic life could gravitate, and probably for the first time in its history, Mariupol became a place which attracted young people who looked for self-realization. Youth moved to the city from more depressed towns and cities in Ukraine, including from occupied territories. To some extent, we can say that the city even had a permanent community of expats from European countries. 

I was part of those transformations, sometimes participating actively, sometimes just watching new meanings emerging. 2014-2022 was the brightest period in Mariupol’s history, and the city was murdered when everything was in full swing. There were loads of processes in the city that I took with a grain of salt, like its ambitions to become some type of a post-industrial Bilbao or Pittsburgh, or local activists’ neglect of Mariupol’s working class issues. Activists’ political agendas were more or less liberal. They decisively promoted freedom of speech, anti-corruption strategies, feminist values, but there weren’t many attempts to criticize, for example, economic neoliberalism. But, anyway, it was a city where you could create and deploy new projects, cultural and political ones, and now, after the devastating siege and occupation, the city has become just another Russian zhopa (asshole). 

All the big cities in Ukraine now have communities consisting of refugees from Mariupol, and I can easily recognize them, not by their Eastern Ukrainian accent but by their iconic civic spirit. Many Mariupol folks are activists deep in their hearts. We spent those 8 years creating a unique culture of social involvement and reflection, while our neighbors spent those same years getting ready to exterminate us. We should have done much more work to prepare ourselves for the war. We were very naïve and self-assured, just like most Europeans now. We just wanted to be creative, all of us. We thought this creativity could somehow be enough to change the world for the better.

VK: Mariupol, as well as the broader Priazovia region, features prominently in your work. How would you describe the Priazovian sonic identity? How have the soundscapes of Mariupol informed the way you work with sound?

SP: If you want to sound politically correct, you should say Nadazovia, which means located in the north of the Azov Sea. In my opinion, Mariupol did have a strong sonic identity. It’s a pity it never had any serious music projects or composers that would work with its identity. In many neighborhoods you could listen to the noises of its industries all night long. The Azovstal Iron and Steel Works’ sounds seemed to penetrate your body, and each sound could be detected as some specific industrial process. That sound pollution pissed the residents off, just like air pollution. But honestly, I remember some absolutely magic moments of listening to the works’ sound metabolism at night on the bank of the Kalmius river. You can hear the iron and steel works at the beginning of Life Outside CV (2019), mixed with Oleksii Podat’s soundtrack. The sound editor said that the sound was unbearable: it was like throwing pieces of raw meat at people’s ears. I wonder if those sounds still haunt the survivors, now that the Azovstal Works is no more. Another iconic soundscape of the city was characterized by bee-eaters’ songs high in the sky on the Pischanka cliffs. You can hear them in the scene in My Favorite Job (2022) where a cyclist is riding a bike through an empty devastated city. It’s a mystery why birds are singing so peacefully when there’s so much suffering and devastation around. It was a perfect stereo for me: bee-eaters in the sky and waves on the sandy beach down below. I wish I could have and listen to hours of such field recordings. 

VK: Your filmic language has evolved quite a lot over the past years. Your films from the late 2000s, made as part of the Fintiktikova Guild of Practitioners performance collective, were very baroque, literary-centric, and formalistic. More recently, you’ve switched to docufiction and even documentary films, a kind of audiovisual (auto)ethnography, two examples being the films My Favorite Job or Life Outside CV. Can you reflect on your artistic trajectory a bit? Has your approach to sound also changed significantly over the years?

SP: As far as I remember, the only practice which united the members of Fintiktikova’s Guild of Practitioners was that we all regularly did the washing-up in Fintiktikova’s kitchen. There were no other principles or common points. Yes, some millionaires avoid paying tax, and some poets avoid doing the washing-up. It’s that trivial. And this is how friends come to the rescue, or the police, or baroque artistic concepts. But everything we did was of course 99% escapism. We made those films featuring the poet Fintiktikova for fun, and you had to be part of the club to understand that fun. It had a lot to do with Oberiut traditions in Russian poetry.^[2]

Since the early 2010s, I gradually became more politically aware and grew tired of fun for the sake of fun. My first experiments in filmmaking were very aesthetic, and I couldn’t help feeling that it was leading me nowhere. I wanted to know more about the world. I wanted my camera to be a tool of critique, not some type of gentle make-up brush. Do I have the right to put everything I see in a film? What is acting? What is living your normal life in front of a camera? Can a film change anything in the life it captures, and how? Is it possible to make truly participatory films? These are some of the questions that arise all the time when I work on films now. 

There are some peculiarities, though, that have remained from my first years in experimental filmmaking. I’m still fond of glitches, unintentional bugs that crop up in interactions with events and technologies. I’m always ready for something can go wrong, and I’m open to spontaneous changes. I write scripts as a sort of self-disciplining exercise, but script drifting is always welcome. Documentary films give me more opportunities to see the world changing, not staying put.

VK: You collaborate a lot with prominent Ukrainian experimental musicians and sound artists. Some of your films, War (2010) or rrrso plasumozak (2011), for example, are even built around sound performances. Where does this interest come from?

SP: When I studied at a Soviet music school as a child, I was very much into composing. I wanted to play my own music, not all those pieces that we were expected to learn. At the same time, I developed some type of ambient approach. Music wasn’t that abstract for me. It tended to have concrete meanings, concrete origins. I knew it was not about any abstract beauty, it was rather about concrete experiences and observations. I’ve always wanted to not only listen to music but to watch it. That’s why I’m a big fan of long walks with some appropriate music in my earphones. 

Watching things and listening to music often go together for me. I know it sounds kind of videoclip-ish, but this is just how it works. War or rrrso plasumozak feature music of Andrij Orel and the duo Riasni Drova (literally, abundant firewood). They have always given me a lot to contemplate and make sense of, and I remember many fantastic walks with their releases in my ears. They no longer make releases, as Oleh Vorobyov, one of the Riasni Drova musicians, died near Bakhmut. Honestly, now I find my cinematic interpretation of Riasni Drova’s “Hangman” in the film War very inaccurate and far-fetched. But it was 2010, and we knew nothing about the war.   

VK: How would you do it today, if at all? 

SP: I wouldn’t call the film War. It was a very inaccurate metaphor. And I would think twice before using “Hangman” as a soundtrack for such an ironic and playful narrative.

VK: From your experience of these collaborations, what can you tell me about the sound art scene in Ukraine? 

SP: When you say sound art, you probably mean some professional or academic practices that can emerge if there’s some specific infrastructure like galleries, art centers, editions, events. Ukraine is a poor country, and we don’t have a developed contemporary music or contemporary sound art scene as it’s understood in the West. I might be mistaken, though. I listen to a lot of Ukrainian music, like Pilikayu, Katarina Gryvul, Polje, Oleksii Podat, Maryana Klochko, but I don’t know if we can describe them as a sound art scene. I’d also mention John Object and his release Piano (2023), partly recorded on the pianos that John Object came across in the frontline area while serving in the Ukrainian army. And of course, I listen to a lot of recordings produced by the Nova Kakhovka experimental music scene that existed until 2022, when the town was occupied by ruscists. That small town in the Kherson region hosted a bunch of noise musicians who created a unique soundscape full of steppe beauty and anticipation of tragedy.

VK: A very prominent kind of sound in your films is the voice. Your early works often centered the highly idiosyncratic voice of the poet and actress Yulia Fintiktikova, processed electronically at times. In some of your recent films, such as the duology I/We (2022) or Khayt (2022), you feature beatboxers. What can you tell me about your approach to voice?

SP: Voice seems to be part of the star economy. Someone is a star, and all the others are paying tribute to the star. It makes everything catchier, easier to grasp, easier to interpret. I’m trying to abandon this approach altogether, as there are very few reasons why someone should be the protagonist only because of their voice or some other feature. I’m more interested in the protagonist, or the voice, that could be a medium of some ideas, some social groups, something that could create a more inclusive context. 

The beatboxer Dake comes from a small mining town in East Ukraine, and he was 14 years old at the time we started to cooperate. His voice helped in working with arborglyphs, graffiti on poplar trees’ bark. Some of the graffiti is easy to read, while others are difficult to decipher. So basically, Dake’s voice was an instrument to interpret all sorts of illegible writings on the bark. It’s a voice of protest and vandalism, raw emotions and violence. There was another performer, Denys, involved in the duology I/We. He recited legible parts of the arborglyphs, which somehow transformed into more or less consistent narratives of the life of a lower-class city resident whose only medium is the tree bark. 

In “Khayt”, the beatboxer Dake participated in imagining the future underground music style of North Azovian Greek communities. We all thought that a combination of beatboxing and qaytarma^[3] music put through modular synthesizers could work best to imagine Mariupol in 2060. Underground and grassroots activities are pivotal for my creative work; they are what inspire me most. I’d like to add that qaytarma is not only a tradition of Crimean Tatars but also the Urum-speaking and Roumean-speaking North Azovian Greeks.

VK: Since the beginning of the full-scale war, you have been volunteering extensively, procuring equipment and supplies for the Ukrainian army, as also documented in the film My Favorite Job. How has this experience influenced your listening and soundmaking practices?

SP: I spend most of my time in an area where the war is present every single hour. Zaporizhzhia has up to 10 air raid warnings per day, and you continually hear sirens. However, the most dangerous type of rockets, the S-300, fall in complete silence, and they’re extremely difficult for air defense systems to detect. So, whether it’s sirens or silence, you’re still exposed to lethal threats all the time. Starlings mimic war sounds: we’ve heard them mimicking the whistle of mines and rattling sound of MLRS (Multiple Launch Rocket System). Ruscists are not supposed to use mines or MLRS in the area near Zaporizhzhia, so it means that starlings migrate from the frontline, kind of touring the country with war songs they have picked up in the combat zone. 

Freefilmers, our cooperative of filmmakers and volunteers, have a base in Zaporizhzhia, where we stay and work and store all the equipment and stuff for the military and military paramedics. In fact, it’s a regular flat in the city. Half of the other apartments in the house are now occupied by refugees who don’t have resources to flee further from the war to safer places. People live under a lot of stress, and not everyone can deal with the reality of the war easily. Our neighbor gets drunk from time to time and sings crazy songs, often interacting with the air raid sirens. These are songs of despair and freedom, distorted by fear and addiction. 

We’ve learned to differentiate between the sounds of clustered munitions, the S-300s, drone attacks, and the work of our air defense systems. These skills matter. There’s some musicality in those sounds. But there’s very little, if any, time for reflection. I note scraps and film bits of my daily reality without thinking too much about what could be produced from these scraps and bits. Our life is very sketchy, with a lot of poetic glimpses, a lot of reasons to laugh, and even more reasons to feel depressed and desperate. I do most of the filming in my head, without using any technologies. Thoughts are the best medium, and being alive is the best battery for your thought-camera.

VK: What are you currently working on, and what are your future plans?

SP: I am working on another documentary called War Songs. This film basically tells the story of the war through amateur songs that I happened to record from the late 2010s up to the very last days before the full-scale invasion. I recorded all the songs only because they were part of other scenes that I shot. And then I realized that these songs are telling the story of the war coming into your life whether you’re ready for it or not. So, it’s going to be a 40-minute film about very traumatic experiences, and I wouldn’t call it a musical, even though two thirds of it will contain songs or music.