A Sniper’s War (Olya Schechter, 2017): USA/Russia/Ukraine

Reviewed by Keyu Zhu. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, 2018

     Olya Schechter’s latest film “A Sniper’s War” is a documentary movie focusing the Russian-Ukrainian conflict with a role of a Russian sniper. The movie was produced by Ukraine Vultures. Olya Schechter’s movie called Lesser of Two Evils made him well-known in the movie industry. His new movie “A Sniper’s War” definitely will help him gain more reputation and praise.The main character Deki here is the Russian sniper who doesn’t like the US government because he thinks it is brutal and bad. The hate encouraged him to join the Ukraine civil war to against Ukraine and also who behind this side such as the United States. The director Olya Schechter got the special access so that he can send the cinematographer to follow him while staying in the war zone so that a lot of scene is real and unfictional. He fought on the side of the pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine. At first the documentary movie showed us how to be a sniper, we realize being a sniper is not that easy, which needed a lot of training purpose. He kills Ukraine soldiers as much as he can because that is what he did. He got traumatic memory in his childhood. His dad used to be an alcoholic beat him every time he is drunk, so his memory gave him the violent personality, which bringing him to the war zone and kill people. Later we’ve seen the interview with the people just being hurt by the war.

The theme of this movie is dark and cold, the coloring is grey which shows people the cruciality of the war. In order to make the emotion deep, cinematographer just went to the warzone to film this documentary. The most important and unique thing about this documentary is that it is so real and informed directly about both soldiers and civilians’ lives. One scene that the soldier has been shot is so real that the audience can feel how much pain he was suffering in the war zone. Also, there was an interview between the filmmaker and the person who has been hurt by this war and saying soldiers just shoot everywhere no matter what.

The narrative style is special, it started with a normal day in a sniper’s view and started with his story. And then talking about his experience in the war zone and then changed into the interview with the person who experience the war as a civilian. The editing is high paced, which truly presented the daily life of Russian snipers and the climax of this documentary is the competition with him and another unknown snipers. The genre is documentary and the style is dramatic because it is smooth and sets a lot of unsolved

I personally really like the film because it is original and real. It gave us a new perspective about how to film a documentary film and also more importantly it lets us know more about the situation in Russia and Ukraine. It taught us how much that the war will bring to normal people and what soldiers do normally in the war zone, which is proud and honored.