A Simple Soldier

Filmed over three and a half years on Ukraine’s frontline, the film follows a young filmmaker who trades his camera for a rifle and joins the Territorial Defence Forces. As war reshapes his life, he moves from storyteller to soldier, documenting fear, loss and resilience amid chaos.

Artem Ryzhykov: ‘I never intended to make a film about myself. When the war began, I picked up a camera for the same reason I always had: to observe, to understand, to bear witness. But once I joined the Territorial Defence Forces, the distance between filmmaker and subject disappeared; there was no safe place to stand.

I became a soldier not because I was brave, but because I was afraid of doing nothing. The camera stayed with me not as a tool of control, but as a way to remain human inside an inhuman reality. Filming became an act of survival — proof that I was still capable of seeing, feeling and remembering.

A Simple Soldier is not about war as spectacle. It is about how war enters a life, reshapes it and leaves behind something fragile, painful and profoundly human.’