Divia At a time when observation remains the dominant approach among contemporary Ukrainian documentarians and it feels as though every subject suited to a distanced gaze has already been explored, in Divia Dmytro Hreshko approaches nature during wartime with radical, dialogue-free minimalism. Originally from Uzhhorod, a city on the Slovakian border, Hreshko has celebrated Ukraine’s landscape in previous documentaries such as Snow Leopards of the Carpathians (2019) or Mountains and Heaven in Between (2022). With his signature admiration for picturesque scenery—captured through drone and sustained by extra-long shots with deep focus—Divia is a harmonious continuation of his career as both director and DP while marking his first overt declaration of love for the nature of his country.
Named after the Slavic goddess of nature, Divia shifts the usual geolocation from Ukraine’s far west to the opposite edge of the front, unfolding a spectacular journey through the country’s vast territories—peering into the rear, de-occupied lands and zones of an active fight. Capturing a wide panorama of various forms of suffering among flora and fauna, Divia offers a hypnotic observation of horror where traces of inherent beauty still remain. Without any written or spoken word of explanation, the film allows nature to speak for itself, helping to express its trauma through the tragic score composed by Sam Slater. Connected by associative editing, sequences portray an eloquent picture of the Ukrainian environment fighting an existential battle on its own front.
The making of the film itself was also a battle. Developed over four years and shot across two, the film continuously adapted to the shifting financial and ideological realities of war, all while fiercely protecting its artistic vision. And just as Divia neared completion last summer, Hreshko joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the combat of Cultural Forces—ultimately finishing the film in uniform. Before its world premiere in Karlovy Vary, I met with Hreshko in Kyiv over a drink. In this interview, he talks in depth about the process of unlocking access to frontline territories to hunt for specific shots, the ultimate defence of a non-dialogue concept and what he is doing now as a film director for the Military Forces of Ukraine. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Filmmaker: I read that you started developing Divia in 2021. What did the initial concept look like, and how did the full-scale invasion reshape it?
Hreshko: At the time, I had the vague idea of making a film about the impact of humans on Ukraine’s environment. During the pandemic, I was walking around the outskirts of Kyiv and often came across areas littered with garbage. I thought it might be interesting to show how people claim space and how that changes nature. Also, to incorporate archival footage from the Soviet era—how factories were built, how industrialization unfolded, how the USSR exploited natural resources and how it influences the Ukrainian environment to date. My producer, Polina Herman, and I managed to pitch it at GoEast, then the invasion began.
It would be strange to make a film about Ukrainians harming nature during wartime, so I decided to reshape it, though the core idea—human intrusion into nature—remained. The full-scale invasion gave the film a much clearer structure: nature and resistance. Still, some of my pre-war aesthetic notions [about] long, static shots were carried over into the new concept. We didn’t start shooting right away because funding was scarce, and I was also working on King Lear at the time. Some time after the invasion, the Ukrainian Film Academy launched a script grant program. When we received our first bit of funding, the question of actually going out and shooting finally arose.
Filmmaker: Previously, you have been working only in the rear front—and you’re originally from Zakarpattia, which is on the opposite end of the country from the frontline. How did you access the lesser-known territory?
Hreshko: Yes, I had never filmed near the front before. Many directors had been shooting there even before the invasion, but for me it was uncharted territory. I started asking around, trying to find people who could guide me. I spoke with a lot of soldiers and industry colleagues trying to figure out how to reach a specific location. My first trip was to Izium, in the Kharkiv region, a few months after its liberation—late autumn, no electricity, no infrastructure. I started by filming the work of the State Emergency Service, and little by little, they began showing me around. That’s how I began exploring the local scenery and getting to know the locals. It actually felt like I was in a video game, slowly unlocking areas on the map.
For about a year, I filmed alone. Again, it came down to funding, as I had to choose between bringing a crew and only affording a week or two of shooting, or going solo with a camera and a drone. Later, once our Polish co-production was finalized and we secured more money, we brought in Volodymyr Usyk as our second DoP and Vasyl Yavtushenko as the sound editor. Honestly, it’s safer to work in pairs, and I wouldn’t go alone now. But back then, I caught this kind of rush. I went once and kept feeling this pull to return to the frontline and shoot more. At that time, the de-occupied territories really did feel like a real-life Stalker Zone—massive destruction, so much to capture. That’s no longer the case as the frontline has shifted. When we were advancing, these devastated areas were accessible. Now we’re retreating and there are no more such zones. In a way, a film like this would be impossible to make today, and I wish I had started shooting earlier. On many occasions, I arrived at a location and people said, “You’re late. Just a month ago, wounded cows were still running through the fields.” But that’s the nature of documentaries. You can’t capture everything, yet you still end up feeling regret.
Filmmaker: What camera and drone did you use?
Hreshko: I used a Panasonic S1H with Canon lenses and a Mavic 3 drone.
Filmmaker: There’s also drone footage from the actual battles in the film. I assume those are sourced materials?
Hreshko: Yes, videos shot by military drones during combat operations. It’s a Mavic as well, though obviously the quality is different. The military was incredibly supportive—some units knew I was making a film about nature, so they’d constantly send me videos via Telegram. For example, one which you see in the beginning shows animals wandering around a shell crater. My task was to find a way to integrate that shaky, low-quality footage, and I eventually found harmony by adding drone buzzes.
Filmmaker: While shooting, did you already know this would be a strict observational documentary without any spoken or written context?
Hreshko: That’s what I always wanted. There were a lot of arguments with the producers, because in workshops the feedback was always split. Some people said it was pure art and everything should stay as is, while others said, “None of this makes sense—you need a voice-over and explanatory titles.”
Filmmaker: That’s an interesting moment, because today we’re seeing a wave of Ukrainian observational documentaries reaching top-tier festivals, and that’s very much a trend supported by Western producers. Still, many of those projects include context for international audiences, like indicating the distance from a filmed location to the front line, or simply titling cities. You managed to exclude all of this until the final cut. How did you argue for that during the pitchings?
Hreshko: It just didn’t work any other way. I mean, imagine a shot with a voice-over saying: “This is a mine—is it dangerous?” I just can’t fathom what could have been said there, and somehow people still agreed with it. But they kept asking me about the titles for a long time, and at some point, I almost agreed. I tried to make the credits with some fragments of facts and discovered a problem: no matter what fact I put in, it would change anyway. I mean, what if I said that “30% of Ukraine’s territory is mined”? In six months, it can be 40%.
Filmmaker: This is the current problem with the films that title the distance to the front, as this distance has now radically changed.
Hreshko: Perhaps it’s great for dramaturgy, but I personally haven’t found a single stable fact. Eventually, we agreed that it was better without titles. There was actually supposed to be a title at the end of the film, something about humans as a part of nature, but eventually I rejected it too because it was too banal. Now all this is absolutely obvious, but we had moments of genuine anxiety. Now we have a premiere in Karlovy Vary and invitations from some other festivals, but when we were not accepted anywhere for a long time during the post-production process, we started to panic a bit and often attributed it to the absence of any explanation.
Filmmaker: You have been editing Divia for quite a while, and I’m curious if the course of the war framed the overall dramatic arc.
Hreshko: While I was still shooting, I had some hopes to end on a positive note with recovering nature, but it was the summer of 2023, when everyone was hyped about the counteroffensive and hoped that the war would end soon. Then the mood changed and it occurred to me to make this story circular. Somewhere in the news I came across a panoramic field with flashes from explosions in the background and realized this is the exact visual I need. It’s not straightforward, but it shows that the war does not remain “somewhere out there” but is only getting closer. Thus, the process shown in the film seems to start again at the end.
Filmmaker: This “circular” quality, as you said, also seems to me to be super apt, given that nature itself is cyclical, and every new sequence seems to convey a new escalating battle. What was the process of finding the right montage?
Hreshko: Editing was painful. I had a rough idea, and even thought about trying to edit it myself, but in the end I figured that I needed a separate person. At first, I invited one editor who has a very cool visual vision and knows more about cinema than I do. She was very excited about the film, but when she started editing, things went wrong. I felt like she wanted to make it more meditative, and I was looking for more structural specificity and clear drama. I realized that either I would give in to her vision and she would make her movie, or we would have to say goodbye. It was not an easy decision, but that’s the main burden of directing—to constantly stand up for what you want, because as soon as you don’t know what to do, someone will come along and offer their own.
Then we worked a little bit with Olha Zhurba. She also made the cut from her vision, and she strengthened the human-equals-nature idea. Thanks to her, we added shots of people hanging out in nature at the very beginning, which enhanced the associative connection with the wild boars that also hang out on the lawns. It worked out super cool. But she was just finishing her film [Zhurba is the director of 2024’s Songs of Slow Burning Earth, 2024] at the time, and she frankly said that she was not coping, unfortunately. Then we turned to Alexander Legostaev. It was a good coincidence that we were invited to a workshop in Warsaw, edited the main part with him and he stayed in our project.
Filmmaker: So you tried three editors?
Hreshko: Four, including me. Each person I worked with, I gave my draft. The editor would rework it, then it would come back to me for reworking again, and only Legostaev brought it to the end. I’m also very happy to work with him. There is a clear distance between the director and the editor, which is very important to me.
Filmmaker: Like Mstyslav Chernov’s 2000 Meters to Andriivka (2025), the music was composed by Sam Slater, and in both films it is excellent and very adaptable for the war’s soundscape. What did the cooperation between montage and music look like? What influenced what?
Hreshko: We were very lucky to work with Sam. I remember when he wrote the score, the producers listened to it and asked: “Where’s the music?” And that’s exactly how I set Sam’s task—the music shouldn’t stick out. Not like in Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, where the music builds the symphony of the whole film, or like in Kossakovsky’s Aquarela. In other words, we had to resist the temptation to edit to the music, and instead adapt the music to the editing. Sam got it. Generally, it’s hard to tell what instrument is playing in his music. All the sounds seem to be invented, and that suited us perfectly. To build this dialogue between editing and music, we worked in parallel and in pieces. We sent Sam the sequences, and he made the music and gave it back to us.
Filmmaker: You once said that you filmed 133 hours. Did you feel that there was a lack of material to expand the emotional amplitude?
Hreshko: Yes, because what I filmed is five percent of the hell I could reach, and even when you manage to get somewhere, you often have to hunt for such shots.
For example, there’s the story of how we filmed the bombed Kakhovka Dam. We had only been filming there for one day and needed a volunteer. We turned to an organization that deals with animals, and I was given a contact. When we arrived, we were faced with the realities of TV filming—it was simply impossible to catch a volunteer, and there were an incredible number of journalists. She appears on the horizon with an animal. I opened my mouth to say that I called her, and ten journalists immediately carried her away. We also didn’t have a boat, so we were in a mess. In the end, TABOR Production [Militantropos, 2025] saved us. Lisa Smith recommended a volunteer who also sailed on a boat saving animals, which eventually made it into the movie.
Filmmaker: I want to express my admiration for one shot at the end of the movie, where a Russian soldier’s corpse lies rotting in the grass in the middle of a quiet field. I found myself thinking that this shot makes this film go beyond the Russian-Ukrainian war doc and enters into the global thesis that nature always takes over, and thus delivers a certain calming effect. Tell me about the origin and purpose of this shot.
Hreshko: Thank you, as I was looking for this shot on purpose. It all started when a video of dogs eating a Russian corpse went viral on Telegram, but soon I filmed a shot of a hawk doing the same and it closed the topic. I needed something else. Then another photo went viral, where sunflowers sprouted from the bodies of Russian soldiers in the fields. I mean, it’s not like I came up with something new; these narratives have already been used. As I said, whenever I was looking for a particular narrative shot at a location, it was often unsuccessful. But when I arrived in the Kherson region and asked the forester if he had seen anything like this, he said yes. These were Russian positions, the whole field was mined, the grass was knee-deep. That’s where this body was lying. There was such a special atmosphere there; perhaps it was captured in the movie, a moment of absolute peace. I was thinking about this Russian soldier who came to kill on our lands, then probably got wounded and bled to death. And according to his pose, perhaps the last thing he decided to do was just lie down, look at the trees and finally merge with nature. He is the evil that nature absorbed, integrated into itself and finally gave this soldier the harmony that he obviously did not have.
Filmmaker: It’s such a powerful alternative to the optimistic ending of the film you were hesitant about. This power of nature provides a sense that there is something that can cope with absolute evil.
Hreshko: Yes, there is also an addition to this in the film, a dead fish that also sprouts. The fish is closer to me, probably because it’s a biblical symbol of a new era of humanity. It’s great that I found both the fish and the body because, ultimately, they represent the same [thing]: the rebirth of life and new beginnings. It’s fascinating. Honestly, I’m talking now and I can’t believe that we managed to make this movie. It’s so long, so complicated, both in performance and emotionally. I’ve never made anything like it.
Filmmaker: Really long, considering that you usually work fast. Judging by the pitches you participated in, by the end of last summer, you were already wrapping up post-production, but then I saw your unexpected announcement on Facebook that you had joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces. How did the fate of post-production unfold after your mobilization?
Hreshko: After returning from abroad, where I finished working with Slatter and Legostaev, I joined the Armed Forces. At that time, the film was about 90% complete, everything was ready except for the sound design, and my team started submitting the film to festivals without sound. Maybe the absence of sound influenced the decision of a number of leading festivals to reject us. We finalized it only recently, and I doubt that we could have finished it for the Berlinale or Sundance, for instance.
From November to January, I was at a training center where I was allowed to pick up my phone for half an hour before sleep, as this is a place for actual combat preparation and things are restricted. I would go outside, catch a bit of Internet and parts from film, listen to the sound and send the last edits to the team right from my phone. I was more than ever grateful for these basic technologies, and also lucky that they allowed me to use the phone at all during the training, because this is not the case in every training center. After training I was lucky enough to get into the Cultural Forces and continue to produce video content for the army.
Filmmaker: And what does the service of a film director within the Ukrainian Cultural Forces look like?
Hreshko: Cultural Forces is a unique place. It’s a sort of platform for cooperation between military artists of various ranges, public figures, business, and they are also very much engaged in cultural diplomacy worldwide, reminding the world of the importance of supporting Ukraine. You may have seen how U2’s Bono invited members of Ukraine’s military to walk the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival, reminding the world that it is thanks to the Armed Forces of Ukraine that Europe remains free.
As I work in film, I was immediately hired to make a documentary about the Cultural Forces tour to the United States. During travels to America, they filmed a lot of footage of themselves basically saying “Thank you,” [and] also talking to various congressmen, ordinary Americans and the diaspora, urging them to support Ukraine. They needed a director and an editor and I was hired for the project. We have just finished it and it should be released soon; it’s called In Thanks We Trust. And it’s an incredible blessing to be in a unit that makes movies after mobilization, and I would never have believed it if someone had told me.