Something I'm Not Ashamed Of - April 10th 2024

April 10th 2024

In one of his many roles in the army, Yuriy has become a documentary a military filmmaker, documenting the challenges of filming a documentary about a fallen young soldier amidst the destruction and despair of war in Ukraine. 

You can email Yuriy, ask him questions or simply send him a message of support: fightingtherussianbeast@gmail.com   
You can help Yuriy and his family by donating to his GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-yuriys-family  
Yuriy’s Podbean Patron sign-up to give once or regularly: https://patron.podbean.com/yuriy  

Buy Yuriy a coffee here: https://bmc.link/yuriymat 

TRANSCRIPT: (Apple Podcasts & Podbean app users can enjoy accurate closed captions)

  It's April 10. 

Right now I have a pretty strange specialty. I'm a military filmmaker. I shoot and edit a documentary about a fallen young soldier. When I was working in television before joining the Army, I saw how many people typically worked on documentaries. There was always a producer, director, editor, several cameramen, a sound person, composer, location scouts and character scouts. Usually it's a whole team of 15 to 20 people. 

We are doing it as a team of two. I'm the director, cameraman, sound guy; I wrote most of the script and even became one of the characters in this film. It's likely that I'll have to compose some of the music for the future film too. Honestly- I'm already prepared for that. I have never made a real film before, and now I am. And it's something I'm not ashamed of. I did not know how to edit videos before the Army, but now I'm helping other people with it. So I think I will manage with music somehow. 

But what I can't manage with is depression. I thought shooting would distract me from dark thoughts, but I could focus on the film and forget about the constant nightmare around me for a while. But it does not work like that. We arrived to shoot in my hometown of Kharkiv, just when the Russians decided to completely destroy it and began bombing it with double hatred. It's very hard to watch the enemy destroy a city that is dear to you. 

And the story of a person we are filming about isn't cheerful either. The guy was 35 when he died. He was a volunteer living behind a wife and two children. He was a person living his life, raising children, being happy, and then -bam- his gone, children are orphans, the wife is a widow, their world is gone, a void in its place. And that's just one story, one family. There are thousands of such stories, such families, endless thousands and there will be even more. Every day of the war, it's a few dozen, maybe even hundreds of obituaries, dozens of hundreds of shattered worlds, orphaned families, and endless pain. 

And it's very hard to come to terms with effect that this will go on for years. That the war will continue for a very long time, that it will take countless lives, destroy new cities, leave behind many more scars. It's for years, for long years. I'll have time to shoot a movie, return to the trenches, serve in the trenches for as long as my health allows, and the war will still go on. And people will die every day. Every. 

Perhaps it's because of this depression, that I'm recording new episodes much less frequently than before. Or maybe it's because I feel that listeners are losing interest in the podcast. Maybe it's just my imagination that they are tired of me, but I see that the last time help came to my go fund me was a month ago, and since when nothing, I'll try to put myself together and start recording more often again. But please don't forget about me either.