A Sniper’s War (Olya Schechter, 2018): USA

Reviewed by Anton Jacobsson, Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival 2018

Olya Schechter has only done two documentaries being Lesser of Two Evils (2015) and now A Sniper’s War (2018). She is the director in both as well as the cinematographer. A Sniper’s War had its world premiere at the Santa Barbara Film Festival this year.

This documentary is about Deki, a Serb who is still angry about NATO bombings during the Bosnian War of the 1990s. He’s in the film that, “The United States is the most genocidal state in the world.” His anger  led him to fight against NATO forces in Ukraine. He first started out serving time in a POW camp in Ukraine. Then he made his way to Donetsk, which is found in the eastern part of Ukraine. Donetsk is a pro-Russian state and here Deki fighted alongside Russian troops killing Ukrainian soldiers when ever he got the chance.

Schechter puts herself in danger in the shooting of this documentary. She in some scene follow them into the war zone to get the footage and to show the world how it is in situations like this. At one time in the movie we can hear Deki telling another soldier to get Olya Schechter out of there. She worked around situations like this by using footage from gopros which were mounted on Deki’s sniper rifle, which helped with capturing the moment but also the variations of clips used in this film.

I really liked this film because it was so different, this is not usually how a war movie is made. I think it makes it feel more real when we follow the soldier Deki in all of his events. We do not just see him shooting at people but also meeting up with kids at some kind of orphanage, this helps us understand that he is also just a human with feelings like all of us.