The director today is a soldier, Oleg Sentsov. Photo: Miguel Medina / AFP
“I’ve had several lives,” he says Oleg Sentsov. Yesterday I was shooting internationally renowned films, today he is on the fighting front in Ukraine with the conviction that nothing is more important than defending your country from Russian aggression.
Imposing in his military clothes, the 46-year-old director, a member of a Ukrainian special forces unit in the Kramatorsk region, recounted the path he took from cinema to prisons by Vladimir Putin and then a the Donbas trenches.
“I do not regret anything”he tells in an interview with AFP during his day off in Kramatorsk, the administrative center of Ukraine where the war has been raging for months.
Director, writer and activist: Oleg Sentsov. Photo: Miguel Medina / AFP
Day 141 of the war: new missile attacks in central-western Ukraine, dozens of dead and wounded
Sentsov, director of the films Gamer (2011) and Rhino, presented at the Venice Film Festival in September, has always been a busy man.
Active in kyiv in the pro-European Maidan movement in the winter of 2013-14, which led to the departure of a pro-Russian Ukrainian president, then to CrimeaWhere is he fromannexed by Moscow in 2014, he was arrested the same year and sentenced in Russia to 20 years of imprisonment for “preparation of terrorist acts”.
imprisoned in siberia
Sent to a prison in Siberia, in the Russian Far East, (where he went on a hunger strike for 100 days), the director was released in 2019. in a prisoner exchange between Ukraine and Russia.
Oleg Sentsov, imprisoned in Russia. Photo: Reuters
His case had motivated an international mobilization, especially among directors such as Ken LoachPedro Almodóvar and Wim Wenders.
In 2018, while in custody, he received the Sakharov Prize from the European Parliament.
“I started my career as a director at the age of 30, I took a break in a Russian prisonI went back to the cinema and now I’m in the army, “he says wryly.
Oleg Sentsov was sent to prison in Siberia and later released in a prisoner exchange. Photo: Miguel Medina / AFP
He unceremoniously abandoned his camera on February 24, the day Russia invaded Ukraine.
“I took my family to Lviv (west) because I was again involved in the territorial defense of kyiv”, then threatened by Russian troops, he explained.
no military trainingthe director spent weeks at checkpoints before leaving to the first line of combat north of the capital.
Oleg Sentsov unceremoniously left his camera on February 24, the day Russia invaded Ukraine. Photo: Miguel Medina / AFP
Since then he has continued to train and “learn,” he insists, joining a special forces unit in charge shoot down Russian helicopters and drones.
“I am part of an intelligence support and defense unit, of the groups that operate mainly the Stingers”, the surface-to-air missile launchers used against low-flying aircraft.
-Do you miss the cinema?
-It is an important part of my life, but only a part.
Oleg Sentsov poses in the city of Kramatorsk. Photo: Miguel Medina / AFP
“Today I live in a completely different world, where it all has to do with war“says the director, who has seen the fighting up close.
Last month, the place where he was located near Bakhmut, southeast of Kramatorsk, was eliminated by an attack. “We weren’t able to move all the bodies,” she complains.
But “in the end Ukraine will win because to make a war for its existenceSentsov says.
“Putin and the Russian Federation do not accept that Ukraine and the Ukrainians I’m not a colonybut rather an independent country, “he added, criticizing” the visions claustrophobic, xenophobic and imperial“from Moscow.
The director who became a fighter continues to live and love. early July married in kiev to a lawyer.
“War is a real test and you get rid of useless things. Only the crucial things remain: love, family and children for which we fight “, he affirms. And for him” life is bigger than cinema “.
Cecile Feuillarte, AFP
ap
Source: Clarin
