During the first days of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, film director Oleh Sentsov joined the Ukrainian Defense Forces. In his role as an army lieutenant, he took part in several intensive battles - and during one, his BMP was destroyed by Russian artillery. In the aftermath, he became embedded in nearby trenches and tried to organize via radio the evacuation of part of his unit. All the while, his men were under consistent attack, and eventually ran out of ammunition, making their evacuation all the more urgent. This military event on the Ukrainian-Russian front line positions was given the code name Real. This is the name of the film.

Curator Serhiy Ksaverov about the film: 

"'Real' best fits the definition of an anti-film. It’s an hour and a half of combat, yet routine, situations filmed without the author's prior intention, which contradicts the very idea of cinema as a lens on reality. 'Real' gains its meaning only as 'found footage,' given by the author himself, and becomes the antithesis of almost any war film—be it propaganda, journalistic, anti-war, or entertaining. 'Real' has no traditional dramaturgy to take viewers on emotional rollercoasters, building up to the most intense moments near the end. 'Real' doesn't 'create' any situation; neither the camera operator nor the people in the frame are aware that they are in a movie. And above all, 'Real' is not a celebration of artistic freedom despite everything—instead, it is the only form of creativity available to a person who no longer belongs to themselves—a spat-out fragment of randomly captured reality that you survived to turn into a film. Others didn’t."