Marcus Lenz and Mila Teshaieva’s emotional sequel to When Spring Came to Bucha takes us on the next phase for the people of the city, rehabilitation. The heavy weight of trauma complements the unflinching truth of what it’s like to live on in the wake of destruction.

The residents of Bucha, Ukraine, are rebuilding their city from the rubble after surviving the horrors of Russian occupation. A newly married couple, a schoolgirl, a city official, and an elderly housewife have all endured the painful experiences of war, yet they manage to hold onto hope and solidarity. But how do you rebuild in the wake of growing trauma especially with war still raging in your country?

Effectively, the sequel to Marcus Lenz and Mila Teshaieva’s excellent “When Spring Came to Bucha,” where the people of Bucha were finally able to return to their city, or in some cases, emerge from hiding after the death and destruction they had encountered. Shards of Light shows that even with the best of intentions of rebuilding yourself and your community, the scars of war will almost certainly still be there. You can fill in the bullet holes deep in your walls, you can move on with your life, get married, have kids. But those scars are still there, and you know they are, as they wear you down.

The previous film left us with hope for these devastated people; we soon learn that leaning on hope isn’t exactly possible. Death and pain fill Shards of Light like a dark, ominous, and never-moving cloud. It is just omnipresent in their lives, so Lenz and Teshaieva document that haunting agony and trauma, it’s all they can do. What they do again, magnificently, is nail the atmosphere and tone of their film, making it feel almost like a prolonged funeral.

There is a starkness that comes through the dark in Shards of Light, as if adding anything but the grim reality of what is occurring in the city would be a betrayal of what they are experiencing. That’s not to say that the people of Bucha are not trying to be hopeful. After all, they are trying to rebuild and bring normalcy back to their land. But in a country still very much in the depths of war, it makes their task all the more difficult.

By providing us with various perspectives, we gain insight into how one person’s trauma differs from another’s. Moving between different generations and people at very different points in their lives, you can gain insight into the impact that everything has had on the community as a whole and goodness, it’s bloody devastating to watch.

That said, and as great as Shards of Light is, there is almost a rushed nature to the film, as if our filmmakers wanted to cover as many people as possible and give us a broad scope of what is happening there, which perhaps caused them to spread themselves a bit too thin. These stories have no resolution as of yet, which is to be expected, yet it’s difficult to accept. We don’t want to see a story that is still in situ; we want, and more importantly, need to see hope again, some glimmer of positivity to cling to, as we saw in the previous film.

Even with the images we see throughout this documentary that evoke extreme emotions from the audience, we are left realising that a large portion of people have moved on from what is still happening in Ukraine, as if we can only focus on one horrible act at a time. These people are still suffering, and although the war has verged on a stalemate for now. The people still need help; they desperately need our continued support and empathy.

For our subjects, their journey to healing, like their city, is a long way off, if it can be healed at all. Thanks to Lenz and Teshaieva, their film, Shards of Light, shows us the emotional and mental turmoil inflicted upon the people of Bucha. We should not forget them, and we should not move on. It is our duty to remember and respect their struggle.

One thing is certain though, Lenz and Teshaieva are not done with Bucha, there is more to tell in this war-torn city and all we can do is hope that the next time they return there with their cameras, that the stories we next hear are as hopeful as When Spring Came to Bucha dreamed of. This essential documentary shows us the long shadows cast by war while also showing the determination of ordinary people who have been wrecked by war and how they will keep battling on, no matter how grim their situation is.

★★★★

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